“... out by the Northern Ireland Office which roves over the idyllically beautiful landscape – those green drumlins and loughs and pebbledashed farms – and concludes with Van’s famous nostalgic last line from ‘Coney Island’: ‘Why can’t it be like this all the time?’ The view I’m given is that the British Government’s policy is to keep Sinn Fein ...”

“... Until the idea of space flight became credible, there were no aliens; instead there were green men who hid in the woods. In the same way, psychotic delusions keep up with scientific change: the people once pursued by phantasms of the dead are now pestered by living celebrities who watch them from inside their TV sets, and those who used to confess ...”

“... where an astonishingly large number of serial killers, from Ted Bundy to Israel Keyes, from the Green River Killer to the Shoe Fetish Slayer, from the Werewolf Butcher of Spokane to the Beast of British Columbia, grew up or operated. Most of them were notably vicious in their methods, even by the high standards of the fraternity. Why there? Why ...”

“... reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third ...”

“... he had lived mostly in Greece. He still painted landscapes, but his work had none of the damp, green, memory-sodden melancholy of the English and Welsh valleys. The light in them was sharp, reflected off the Aegean; his palette in paintings such as Landscape, Hydra (1960-62) shimmers. The figures in these vivid landscapes were seldom single: they were ...”

“... Does Peter Lake​ ever sleep? Even at 666 pages this is not the longest of his books, which descend on the study of the decades around 1600 like a great waterfall. There are no signs of fatigue, no inanimate sentences. Behind the loosely conversational manner of his prose lies a precision of thought and structure ...”

“... elders have his blood. Their fate is in their veins. In the eyes of the mob, the gutter press, the green-ink subscribers to Hatebook and the spite chorus that dances on reputation, they will soon be reckoned fair game: one false move, one barney in a Croxteth pub, one liaison with a granny of the night. These creatures irresistibly recall another unusual ...”

“... for short – within walking distance of Notting Hill. In the 1950s, the area was the domain of Peter Rachman, the Polish-born refugee turned slum landlord who exploited the hostility of the housing market towards Black immigrants, buying up run-down houses in Paddington and North Kensington and renting them to desperate people at extortionate ...”

“... wakes during the poignant Hanukkah scene. Suddenly there was a crash from below the attic. The Green Police? The Gestapo? Everybody onstage froze. Straining to hear. For a few seconds there was total silence and then something in Moses short-circuited. Not rising, but propelled out of his seat, he hollered ‘Look in the attic! She’s hiding in the ...”

“... real world and an ideal alternative. Both Jack Zipes’s The Wounded Storyteller and Peter Wortsman’s ‘The Golden Pot’ and Other Tales of the Uncanny include translations of ‘The Sandman’, Hoffmann’s most famous text. ‘The Sandman’, the ur-text on the Doppelgänger, has been the object of a dizzying number of readings, among them ...”

“... air. Ravers joined in a raggedy coalition with the New Travellers, whose knowledge of England’s green spaces proved crucial to evading the police. Out of this emerged the ‘free party’: an outdoor gathering that broadly resembled the free festivals of the 1970s and 1980s, but with space rock and campfires swapped for cutting-edge electronic music and ...”

“... Ms Ortiz Taylor sets up her fiction on much shakier ground – not on the turf of the village green but on the thin crust of earth which protects California from the San Andreas fault. If she also selects a homely simile, it is to pile layer upon layer the pretexts for her heroine’s insecurity: ‘Picture, if you will, a tiny child standing next to her ...”

“... which is awaiting it upon the cinema screen. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and William Peter Blatty’s Legion (‘The sequel to The Exorcist’) very neatly illustrate this parting of the ways. If Susan Hill’s ‘ghost story’ is not a pastiche, it is undoubtedly an essay in recreating the almost exhausted genre. We are back in that indefinable ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... uncannily like one of those advent-calendar mobiles they used to make out of coat-hangers on Blue Peter. That’s how it goes with structures of occult significance. Phenomena which seem loaded with brooding horror by evening have a funny way of looking limp, harmless and rather foolish by the rising light of day. In one section of the novel – Book II to be ...”