“... sort’, but ‘with much to contend with: among other things a terrific wife with a large head of white hair and tortoiseshell spectacles, who appears to be the worst scandalmonger in the county’. James regularly visited Herefordshire to stay with Gwendolen McBryde, an eccentric widow who ran a stud farm. She had married a close friend from his ...”

“... claimed that the Jewish state, which sold arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa, embodied white supremacy not democracy. Muhammad Ali saw Palestine as an instance of gross racial injustice. So, today, do the leaders of the United States’s oldest and most prominent Black Christian denominations, who have accused Israel of genocide and asked Biden to ...”

“... Worldwide, CFC production should be phased out by 2010. With a journalist’s disenchantment, Norman Moss reports in Managing the Planet that bootleg CFC is still being made in Russia and China and smuggled into wealthier countries, but, since CFC is bulky and cannot be sniffed with any pleasure, the trade is gradually dying out. The hole in the ozone ...”

“... his youth among a generation of thrawn poets with their country expansiveness: I’m thinking of Norman MacCaig in his Assynt mode; Iain Crichton Smith of the Highlands; George Mackay Brown in his Orkney remoteness; and Hugh MacDiarmid, always in among the fields and dykes, metaphysical or real. None of these men gave much quarter, and, next to them, Morgan ...”

“... were hard, yellow apples filled with powerful juice. They exploded against the teeth, they spat white flecks like arguments.’ From the story ‘Am Strande von Tanger’, on the death of a bird: ‘A heart no bigger than an orange seed has ceased to beat.’ From his first novel, The Hunters of 1957, a description of fuel tanks jettisoned by ...”

“... and dressed up again. This time, though, nobody laughed as we were all dressed up, in the suit, white tie, mortar-board and gown that were obligatory for the occasion. This was, I suppose, the last and most significant examination in my life and it was in this examination that I cheated, just as I had cheated a few years before to get the scholarship that ...”

“... one general, one on the taxing powers of the Scottish Parliament – would be held following a White Paper, but before a Bill was introduced into the Commons. This was a bold move, much criticised in Scotland. It implied some alarm about the prospects of a Bill, and the referendums were probably intended as much as a curb on MPs in a Commons with a small ...”

“... of hospitality in 1575. Among other remodellings, Leicester had enlarged the windows of the Norman keep the better to show off his substantial collections of maps and paintings (their glassless shapes in the remaining walls still look impressive, even from the bench), but, dissatisfied even with the enormous hall and galleries added by John of Gaunt in ...”

“... the previous year that ‘sometimes you remind me of a gentleman in full evening dress and white gloves attempting to put something right with the kitchen plumbing without soiling his attire.’ It comes as no surprise when the great man announces that ‘Edimbourg is nearer to being my spiritual home than is Glasgow.’ Yet one of the many strengths ...”

“... going to be a delay. I hadn’t looked at the book in front of me in more than thirty years – Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his two convention pieces from 1968 – and just as my phone began to buzz my eye landed on a sentence: ‘The reporter was a literary man – symbol had the power to push him into actions more heroic than ...”

“... to be exposed early to Greek or Latin, or even to their own language as it existed before the Norman Conquest, tend to find the notion of grammatical case baffling despite the survival in English of a genitive case (renamed possessive) and the distinction between subject and object pronouns in the first and third persons. Evidently, the alleged Irish ...”

“... or quoted inflated rents. In 1989, when five black and Latino teenagers were arrested for raping a white woman in Central Park, Donald paid for full-page advertisements in New York newspapers, demanding the boys’ execution. When they were exonerated, he wouldn’t apologise: ‘Tell me, what were they doing in the park, playing checkers?’ Donald seems to ...”

“... like home.’ As age succeeds to age one kind of inconvenience gives way to another, from smoky Norman halls to the stark artistic interiors of the ‘First Russian Ballet Period’. Meanwhile in the ‘Ordinary Cottage’ a comfortable soul, with her kettle on the hob and a reproduction of The Monarch of the Glen on the wall, sits in an armchair reading ...”

“... be calling her the next Maria Callas.’AnnieLee goes back to her alter ego’s mansion in a white limo. For a minute and a half, it’s All about Eve, Y’All, with the wannabe singer trying on the star’s clothes and wondering how to be true to herself, even (or perhaps especially) if she doesn’t quite have a self. AnnieLee lies about her past and ...”

“... speaking the poems in Gaelic. I was lucky to be on the stage of the Abbey Theatre when Sorley and Norman MacCaig came to Dublin to read at the launching of their excellent poetry records: my job was to read some of the translations (this time by Sorley MacLean), but my interest was in hearing the Gaelic. Again, this had the force of revelation: the ...”