“... hostility other than to fawn. There are other recognisable names. Kinnock was very dependent on Peter Mandelson: when Mandelson resigned as director of communications in order to stand for Hartlepool Kinnock ‘almost literally’ hopped with rage. He thought Mandelson ‘irreplaceable’; without him Walworth Road would ‘collapse’. And there are the ...”

“... A raised stage, three metres long, about a metre high, is dressed with a flimsy backdrop of beige, brown, grey; here and there are torn swatches of yellow, green and maroon. At first we seem to see an austere Kurt Schwitters collage from the early 1920s. Close up, we discover unadorned cardboard, plain or coloured card. The wings of the stage are decorated ...”

“... the celebrated three-volume History of Jamaica, first published in 1774 and never out of print. (Peter Fryer described Long as the ‘father of English racism’ in Staying Power, his classic study of Black people in Britain from 1984.) I would see Clare and also make a final visit to Lucky Valley, Long’s plantation in Clarendon. Would this mark the end ...”

“... of ice-cream, almost perfectly round a moment ago, dissolve slowly in even, hybrid trickles of brown and white. I watched movement, myself unmoving, my eyes fixed on the dish. My hands lay stiff on the table, and I tried with all my might to keep still, to hold onto immobility. But I could feel motion oozing over my body too. The immobile is in a ...”

“... in order ‘to protect the mainland’. McCartney has campaigned vociferously with Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson against the Agreement – in April, at the launch of the United Unionist campaign, he gave the clenched fist salute – and though most people regard him as a provincial politician, his policy of trying to make Northern Ireland permanently part of ...”

“... details: the Shipman is riding awkwardly, wears a knee-length cloak of Irish cloth, is tanned deep brown and has a dagger tucked under his arm. Then come some professional facts: he has drunk a good deal of wine on the journeys to and from Bordeaux when his merchant client hasn’t been watching, he fights hard and has no scruples about throwing his opponents ...”

“... and proudly conventional writers and critics, such as Ruth Padel, Fiona Sampson, Andrew Motion and Peter McDonald, have found positive things to say. Last year Prynne received a Society of Authors award. The publication of the collected Poems in 1999, an ever fattening volume updated in 2005 and again last year, each time gathering in new collections and ...”

“... the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his scholarly ...”

“... their correspondence began.Lady Bradshaigh, ‘middle-aged, middle-sized, a degree above plump, brown as an oak wainscot’, was born Dorothy Bellingham into an established Lancashire family in 1704 or 1705. She told Richardson she had been the ‘worst’ of the family’s three girls, ‘very lively, and very faulty’. In 1731, after a dogged ten-year ...”

“... is the collection now housed in Amherst.) Dickinson, Bingham explains, wrote on backs of brown-paper bags or of discarded bills, programmes, and invitations; on tiny scraps of stationery pinned together; on leaves torn from old notebooks (one such sheet dated ‘1824’); on soiled and mildewed subscription blanks, or on department or drug-store ...”

“... who have done the best work on her project have been former students, including Howard Caygill and Peter Osborne, who together now teach at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. (Gilroy too was Rose’s student before he moved to Stuart Hall in Birmingham. She was a ‘great’ teacher, he has said, and he followed her ...”

“... and speak English, but the lingua franca is still Juba Arabic, a somewhat impoverished dialect. Peter, my boda-boda (motorcycle-taxi) driver, is Ugandan; for although the major businesses here all belong to government ministers and governors, or to their children, the gilded youth of Juba who returned from abroad after the peace agreements, almost all ...”

“... of France’s fortifications along its eastern border with Germany. Donald and his brother, Peter, are not yet proficient enough in English to understand the text, so Joe translates it into German:The essential points of the French system, which was carried out on a gigantic scale, are as follows: a line of fortified casemates giving each other mutual ...”

“... opposed to Hildesheimer’s Mozart, which appeared in German 18 years ago and provided Peter Shaffer with a congenial source for the elaboration of Amadeus, later to be loudly amplified by Forman’s film. Hildesheimer drew a picture of Mozart as a sort of autist, unable to form satisfactory human relationships (‘Human ties, as we know them, were ...”

“... na Mara (‘shieling of the sea’) in Kilpheder (from the Gaelic Cille-pheadair, or ‘church of Peter’). Ten square miles of machair stretch from the western dunes to the eastern rocky moors. This is a plain of shell-sand, where millions of cockles and whelks, razor-shells and buckies, ground into ivory fragments smaller than a baby’s fingernail, have ...”