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“... in the Eighties, culminating with a slaughter of innocent citizens. A police detective, John Richards, and an Attorney-General, Terry Gleason, collaborate to bring the gang to book. The criminals prove to be, not the usual run of bank robbers, but Sixties student radicals, now regrouped as ‘the Bolivian Contingent’. Their leader is a nasty ...”

“... whereas Corvo or Lowry, Hamilton or Conrad Aitken, and maybe poets like Dylan Thomas and John Berryman of more recent date, are celebrated inside their own time-warp, relished as creatures of their epoch. A disillusioned devotee is the worst that can happen to them; and although I enjoyed rereading Twenty Thousand Streets and reviewing it in these ...”

“... follow. Even Day-Lewis was not wholly exempt from it when he received the laurels. His predecessor John Masefield had his merits, but writing good verse for occasions was not one of them. Indeed there is an interesting resemblance between the ghastly good taste of the modern tombstone – in chaste Cotswold or slate with a brief restrained inscription – and ...”

“... one man more than any other put an end to late 17th-century stalemate. ‘Lieutenant-General Lord John Churchill, Earl of Marlborough, resolved to change all that. In military history, unlike most other branches of history, the individual who by his own will and accomplishments alters the course of events still strides across the record.’ Tolstoy would have ...”

“... allegiance of the individual talent to the collective identity of the team. In this light John Major’s cricketpersonhood is no accident, since the person who put the ‘gray’ back in Great Britain knows very well that cricket washes whiter. Nash avoids such immediately topical reference in favour of an old and valued sitting duck, Newbolt’s ...”

“... eat. How many of us who know that milk is pasteurised have also heard of the ingenious Irishman, John Tyndall, who in the 1870s discovered that mother bacteria are destroyed by heating food or milk, but that their offspring survive? These sturdy youngsters have had their powers of resistance much reduced, however, so that they succumb to an ensuing bout of ...”

“... bias towards quickness. Koch, in his poem ‘A Time Zone’, talks about his collaborations with John Ashbery on some more or less light-hearted – and certainly light – verse. These collaborations, which again put us in mind of Auden, feature the following (unpunctuated) lines: ‘He is not writing much this year but he likes to collaborate/So do I we do ...”

“... involved with him for fear of censorship on moral or political grounds. One future bishop called John Personne, the author of Strindbergian Literature and Immorality among Schoolchildren, blamed Strindberg for masturbation among the young. The Bonniers’ business suffered from publishing him and the subsequent rejections fed Strindberg’s ...”

“... different style. I’d never heard anything like it,’ Count Basie said. In time he employed her. John Hammond, the pioneering record producer who ‘discovered’ Holiday, said: she ‘changed my musical tastes and my music life’; she ‘sang like an improvising jazz genius’. ‘I don’t think I’m singing. I feel like I’m playing a horn. I try to ...”

“... of throwing high-sounding philosophical phrases at each other. (I think this was a hint taken from John Buchan’s autobiography, where he links stretches of countryside with metaphysical systems.) Iris said into my ear: ‘The teleological suspension of the ethical.’ I shouted over my shoulder: ‘The transcendental unity of apperception.’ And then we ...”

“... tripe she borrowed. My copies of Hemingway’s Fiesta, Warwick Deeping’s Sorrell and Son and John Braine’s Room at the Top (a first edition) have the faint purple imprint of Fincham’s rubber stamp on their flyleaf. These did not go into the Essex ditches. I also toyed with keeping Forever Amber (recalling it as being ‘hot’), but let it go. I kept ...”

“... Somewhere among wires and chimneys, the skill of a songbird starts. His practice is to fill his gizzard with flies and sing all he knows. His song is a game played with stones, the play of water over water-polished stones. Now is the twilight of a working day. Brick is dry, rich and absorbent like bread. I sing a few small drops of rain burning, big river-stones gleaming black through wet, dead grass in the walls, in the flood of night-wind turning ...”

“... Given that it’s not so far been settled to everyone’s satisfaction exactly what the belligerents had in mind when they went to war in 1914, we shouldn’t perhaps get too impatient as the junta who ordered up the invasion of Iraq try to settle on a postwar reason for having done so that will make those of us who remain unretractably opposed to it seem to be sulking, or even Saddam-friendly ...”

“... It’s not true to say that only bad books make the bestseller list. But it is a little bit true, and it is always the case that bad books greatly outnumber good ones at the top end of the charts. Sometimes, too, you come across an example of pure negative correlation between the quality of a book and the level of its sales. One such example is upon us in the case of Being Freddie, the autobiography of England’s cricketing national hero Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff ...”

“... But oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go. Lennon-McCartney I Driving to Mirtiotissa We learned to avoid the village to drive through the olive groves                                                       evading children and dogs                             and old men with sodden voices calling to one another through the trees the way we avoided noon                                            or the sickening halt of the butcher’s doorway leaving the white-hot streets and the slide of traffic islands of rubble                              flashes of broken glass oil-slicks and fruits-spills                                           the sudden untenable light cruising the dirt roads and alleys on blue afternoons for something we almost found again and again: a sand-lizard perched on a rock or a clump of thorns the fretwork between its fingers                                                     the fire-coloured throat the spiders in the gaps between the rocks goats in the weeds                                their slack mouths and sun-bleared eyes remembering panic that faint trace of shit and vanilla that hangs in the shade ...”