“... the beginning was the Word’ – Roger read from Helmore’s Bible found open at St John. Isabella moved her lips, ‘The Word was Manchester.’ Shh, shh, the shovel said. Shh … This final passage suggests many things: that Isabella will shortly crack up, that she is beginning to hate her mission, that the author intends an ironical ...”

“... Wyndham Lewis’s portrait of Stephen Spender upstages a row of portraits by Lamb, Coldstream and John because of its linear clarity and bite, and a Matthew Smith holds your eye by force of juicy paint and saturated colour alone. Yet thin paint in the work of Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash is part of an Englishness (or rather of two sorts of ...”

“... Schreiber’s book, was a talker too. Professor Schreiber, who teaches criminology at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, had to listen to him for six unbroken years before she could begin to write his terrible story. When the 38-year-old shoemaker from Philadelphia was finally arrested in 1975, he and his 14-year-old son Michael had murdered ...”

“... able’ Principal Private Secretary, Elizabeth Arnot a ‘bright young education specialist’, John Lyons a ‘very able’ general secretary, and Tom McNally an ‘excellent political secretary’. They were all quite wonderful, brilliant and magnificent, but unfortunately they could not tackle the main issue: ‘There was part of the unemployment ...”

“... led her to put such effort into paring herself down to the bone – as in the line from a poem by John Hewitt: ‘A tree is truer for its being bare.’ However, when it comes to her ‘recalling’ a rape by a motorcycle gang, even Josie concedes that it may have all been in her head: ‘A common fantasy among young women, so I’m told.’ What did happen ...”

“... he was always a storyteller for boys, in the tradition (a very good one) of R.L. Stevenson and John Buchan. In A Sort of Life, which was as near to an autobiography as he was ever prepared to go (and itself the result of psychotherapy for a period of writer’ block), Greene tells how he first came to keep a record of his dreams. Though it’ not at all ...”

“... has benefited greatly from the attentions of the Hull-based magazine Bête Noire. In the past year John Osborne, the magazine’s editor, has published a hundred of the poems now included in Goodstone, and it is very much thanks to this exposure that Voss has secured a mainstream British publisher. In Osborne’s estimation Voss addresses factory experience ...”

“... This prevalent lack of confidence and the starry-eyed attitude towards Europe are summed up by Mrs John Sherwood in 1884 in Manners and Social Usages: ‘There is no country where there are so many people asking what “is proper to do” ... as in ... the United States of America. The newness of our country is perpetually renewed by the sudden making of ...”

“... that had hung in his nursery, he meets Queen Victoria, seated on a piebald pony and attended by John Brown. (The expedition’s ponies had suffered atrociously.) ‘ “Happy Birthday,” sang the man holding the bridle. And oh, how warm it was.’ This may strike us as well over the top, uncharacteristic of the author, an afterglow from Peter Pan. Yet it ...”

“... he has a light touch, and is invariably amusing. In their ‘Dear Bill’ letters in Private Eye, John Wells and Richard Ingrams cast Deedes as the foil to Denis Thatcher. He was Ernie Wise to Thatcher’s Eric Morecambe. But the role of straight man came naturally to him. Dear Bill (the book, that is) should make a merry Christmas for thousands of its ...”

“... of his baby daughter, who had in fact been killed, as had Evans’s wife, by the serial killer John Christie – Evans would now be recognised as a vulnerable defendant – to the more humane spirit in which trials are conducted today. There is still rhetoric, but the register of persuasive speech is more often conversational than grandiloquent (although I ...”

“... situations, often having used his wealth to make them happen. In 1931, he was the first to publish John Betjeman, who had been a fellow student at Oxford. In 1933 he financed the final collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. When Salvador Dalí was nearly suffocated by the diving suit he wore to the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in ...”

“... can to shut them all down.The present crisis began to show in Asia towards the end of last year. John Kemp, a Reuters energy analyst, describes the emergency there as a shock similar to Britain’s terrible winter of 1947 or the oil crisis of 1973: a sudden event that exposed deeper structural problems. Pakistan warned of a major gas shortfall last October ...”

“... you out of this fantasy is the first line of dialogue, delivered matter-of-factly by the farmer, John, to his wife: ‘Mary? I’ll ask you again. How many times did you come?’ This isn’t your average farm but a site of adultery, fecklessness, vice. This is a Kevin Barry short story because it could only be a Kevin Barry short story. There Are Little ...”

“... numerous telephone calls; various literary tie-ups, Hardy and Eliot, Milton and Coleridge, John Cheever and Adrienne Rich, all load-bearing and well-worked; the ministrations of a professional psychologist (‘On a scale of one to ten?’) and those of a well-intentioned amateur (‘She shuts her eyes, as if to meditate. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,” she ...”