“... Lisa Anne Gurr combed through Simenon’s Maigret books to confirm that drinks indicate social class and that Maigret drinks a great deal of beer, brandy, wine and coffee; he has herb tea when ill. Anthropologists anxious to examine the habits of their fellow drinkers must be unrelaxing holiday companions. But alcohol – like food, sex and work – is a ...”

“... in County Cork, is the setting of The Silence in the Garden – decayed gentry rather than middle class. The Rollestons established their inheritance centuries before the book begins, and had an ancestral reputation for decency and kindness to their tenants during the Great Hunger. On the very first page the chronological parameters are drawn: It is ...”

“... who escapes to India in the Thirties, is interned there as an enemy alien for the length of the war, and lives out the rest of his life, poor and lonely, in a Bombay slum. His only friend is a feisty German who was once in cabaret in Shanghai – the kind of woman who might have been sung by Lotte Lenya or played by Marlene Dietrich in her Touch of Evil ...”

“... devices. No doubt there’s much to be said, and not all of it simply wishful, about working-class energies, the fruitful mixing of cultures, the melding of black and white. What strikes the visiting eye is the squalor and the distress. Flying to London from New Zealand, you spend 24 hours in the air. Even with a break of two days in Los Angeles it takes ...”

“... debts. But today a bank overdraft rather than an account in credit seems to be the norm for middle-class people. I remember, when I was ten years old, the horrific impact upon my recently widowed mother when a friend suggested that if she was contemplating financial difficulties, her bank manager would doubtless oblige with an overdraft. Today not only have ...”

“... His earlier novel Dog Soldiers was about the legacy of corruption left to America by the Vietnam War. In A Flag for Sunrise the theme is American incursion into the Third World. The scene is the small corrupt Central American republic of Tecan – fictional in name but in little else. At first we appear to be in Greeneland: at a derelict mission station on ...”

“... is wildly inaccurate to describe the pre-Revolutionary Church as ‘the old religion of a middle-class élite’. Mistakes of this sort are perhaps not very important in themselves, but they undermine confidence. More serious, in view of her argument that David was much influenced by Rousseau, is a certain vagueness about what Jean-Jacques actually said, and ...”

“... single most successful assertion of the British national interest since the Second World War and an excellent example of wise state intervention’ – would gain general assent except in the case of the section preoccupied (as he is not) with the hazards of nuclear power. He talks of integrated transport and energy policies as though he means it. He ...”

“... may be; nor, surprisingly, has it much to say about such current obsessions as race, colour and class. For protagonists of the sex war, however, there is a substantial amount of ammunition, ranging from ‘A maid that laughs is half taken’ (English Proverb) to ‘A woman is occasionally quite a serviceable substitute ...”

“... I was blind, now I see,’ did not show up at all well and were regarded as rather second-class sinners. Philip Toynbee gives himself no airs as a sinner. He is capable of an occasional rhetorical flourish about ‘the stews and gutters of Babylon’ and his own early apprenticeship to drunkenness, gluttony and lust, but the rakehelly ...”

“... of his three blockbusters. Eye of the Needle is set in 1944. There is only one man who can win the war for Hitler, a ruthless superspy who has discovered the Normandy invasion plan. The ‘Needle’ – so called for his penchant for the stiletto as a killing weapon – is a cold-eyed, brilliant and ruthless German aristocrat. He has style and is irresistible ...”

“... National Context to show the limitations of reason within this movement. The needs of the social class within which the movement took place, and of the state within which they lived, put firm preconceptions into their reasoning. So it was entirely consonant with enlightened thought that serfdom should continue in Bohemia, or in the coal works of ...”

“... old friend. He is swamped with memories; of his brother, killed in the Philippines in World War Two; of his mother who never recovered from this loss; of his first wife, missing since the mid-Sixties; of his miserable, angry second marriage and his alcoholic wife; and above all of Drenka, the mistress, the respectable Yugoslavian woman who became an ...”

“... fuzzy; she was a great curser (a message left on my answering-machine at the outbreak of the Gulf War consisted entirely of oaths), but byzantinely courteous – an icily disarming ‘forgive me’ accompanied by a salaam and a chuckle was a favourite introit. She had exceptional verbal acuity but surrounded her trenchancies with long pauses, huge wheezes of ...”

“... the peripheries: ‘its language,’ he asserts, ‘issues from the ranks, not from the officer class. That language rips out of slums, back streets, building sites, workshops and the “sheer plod” of rural drudgery.’ The Irish theme in this reading of Hopkins, instead of rendering the poet ‘irrelevant’ or merely provincial, had the bracing effect ...”