“... have cruised down the Lea Valley from Lippitt’s Hill Camp at High Beach, a base right beside John Clare’s Epping Forest asylum, and they’ll be back again tomorrow. Sukhdev Sandhu, who flew with the sky cops for his book Night Haunts, called the experience ‘the panoptic sublime’. The machines cost half a million pounds each, a sum that pays for a ...”

“... knowing that Mary was eventually bent to God’s plan. And, perhaps for the first time, Minnie took pity on her child self. In fragmented entries she recalled ‘Ed. coming. Fear of him. Love? Always a strain.’ It was ‘a terrible time. Dreary, helpless. From the first the most fatal thing was the strain on my conscience of the position toward Edward ...”

“... day: one of those erotic days that [Alphonse] Daudet likes to describe. It began to drizzle. She took – mind you, I was her master and she was my slave – she took hold of me by the hair at the back of my head and said to me ‘Come.’ What followed was the sensations we have all experienced. But the sweet clasp of my ...”

“... of his uncle being a farm-labourer, or the blighted life of the intelligent, radical cobbler John Antell who married into the family. Instead, Hardy exaggerates the scale of the Rockhampton cottage where he was born, his father’s status in the social scale (he attributes his comparative lack of success in the building business to his being by nature ...”

“... new poem, and gave the poet a genial thumbs-up. Some years later Hughes told another variation to John Carey, to which he added some Jungian grace notes, and the probably too uncanny touch that the visitor was Hughes himself with a vulpine head. In Poet and Critic, an interesting edition of Hughes’s correspondence with Keith Sagar, we have yet another ...”

“... was taken to Berlin, where it belonged to the cellist and teacher Hugo Becker, with whom Hermann took lessons. It was transported to London and finally to the Museo del Violino in Cremona, where it had been made three centuries earlier.The protagonists of the final – comic – story are the ‘world’s most famous shipwrecked cello’, the ...”

“... fixer in the union and on the council rather than a campaigner (no one can remember any causes he took up); a man who was frightened of talking politics at home, because his first wife Jenny objected to them. Percy, we learn, was ‘very narrow-minded’. He had kept his son and daughter at grammar school, thus enabling Mark Hudson’s father to make his ...”

“... country. One daughter is an architect; the other daughter and the son are, like him, lawyers. ‘I took my son to make his first appearance in the Supreme Court,’ he said. ‘He looked at the portraits of the old judges and there he saw his grandfather.’ Youssef Hakim, Jacques’s father, had been an Ottoman-trained jurist who served on the Court during ...”

“... end of a long winter hunger – ‘They are never curst but when they are hungry.’Shakespeare took his play from a novella by Robert Greene called Pandosto: or, The Triumph of Time. That subtitle may have been one of the things which mainly interested the dramatist in it, the other being the incestuous plot situation that drives its royal hero to his ...”

“... his performance. Steroids, for Bonds, were evidence not of the duplicity of the players who took them but of the hypocrisy of the baseball establishment that allowed them to get away with it. Bonds didn’t see McGwire’s inflated torso and equally inflated bank balance as a sign that baseball was cheating the public; rather, it was a sign that ...”

“... of normal life. Some of them had kept the newspaper cuttings describing their crimes, and they took pictures of one another, delighted with themselves, and would gather round to stare at the results. They would swap these pictures and pin them up and show them to any girls who were adventurous enough to come near the school.It would take me years to work ...”

“... these new places, in our Ayrshire, that spoke of the lives we were supposed one day to live. We took it for granted – much too early, as it turned out – that farming was a thing of the past, a thing people did before they were sophisticated like us. We never considered the stuff on our plates; we thought the school milk came on a lorry from ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”

“... nature’s experiments, not as the culmination of nature’s design, echoes Berlin’s use of John Stuart Mill’s phrase ‘experiments in living’. (It also, of course, echoes Jefferson’s and Dewey’s use of the term ‘experiment’ to describe American democracy.) Like Berlin, I have been criticising the Platonic-Kantian attempt to do what Berlin ...”

“... up the steeply banked terraces. But noble as the site appears, it is not entirely benign. The poet John Lucas, in 92 Acharnon Street, reminds us that the old Olympic stadium is where ‘the Colonels assembled schoolchildren for parades so that they might learn to salute the Greek flag.’ Across a never relenting stream of traffic, motorbikes cascading from ...”