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“... curious attempt at a contemporary poetry list. Pritchard’s verse is full of lines like ‘in green garden’s shade’, or ‘in snow-flake silence of the December dawn’, or ‘all moonsplashed night’, or ‘after night’s hot rage’. He believes that poetry is signified by omitting the definite article – a flowery splutter, as if it were being ...”

“... when the jewels her father had given her as a child were transformed into a library in Bethnal Green. She relishes the memory of the day she had to dismiss her domestic staff after her sudden impoverishment during the Depression. ‘It was like general demobilisation after a war.’ Flora Solomon’s quest for a firm on which she might model Simon ...”

“... considered sinful in their time: they are Rahab the harlot, Bathsheba who was tempting to King David, Tamar who coaxed her father-in-law – and even Ruth, who crept under the bedclothes of Boaz, her kinsman. Does not this suggest that Matthew wanted to show that Mary was descended from ‘sinners’? This is far-fetched. We are not convinced that Matthew ...”

“... toward its present form. McDowell is a Senior Fellow of Trinity and a well-known historian. David Webb is a Fellow Emeritus of the College and Honorary Professor of Systematic Botany. ‘Virtue and religion’ meant, of course, Anglicanism. The Fellows of Trinity were required to take an oath and, in most cases, to take Anglican orders. Undergraduates ...”

“... made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David Cameron of his generation, blessed with born-to-the-purple public school assumptions and a casual, unimaginative indifference to the everyday struggles of the masses. Not that there was ever any ‘swank’ about Attlee, but at Oxford between 1901 and 1904 ...”

“... of man from that other one I might have been had I remained in Libya; and the hours after seeing David with the Head of Goliath in the Galleria Borghese, searching for shade and finding a place to rest under a pine on a green beside the Sant’Andrea al Quirinale – all seemed to fold together and collapse like a ...”

“... of the sporting idea, whether you are doing it with Amaryllis in the shade, or on the village green with your grandchild Wilhelmine. You are disported, carried off out of yourself. In botany, a ‘sport’ is the wayward offshoot of an otherwise predictable shrub. The definition of ‘a real sport’ is a girl like Catherine Morland, the heroine of ...”

“... his offer of a Sweet Afton, and as I do so he notices my copy of Dean Godson’s biography of David Trimble, Himself Alone, lying in the back seat with David McDuff’s new translation of The Idiot and some other holiday books. When I say I want to write about Himself Alone, he exclaims: ‘A thick brick like that! I ...”

“... and cities, supporting 1400 projects, far more than any other country in Europe. According to David Mackay, a former officer in the Parachute Regiment who was project manager of the Glasgow CityWatch CCTV system for two years, ‘so positive has central government support been that, by 1997, the bulk of Home Office expenditure on crime prevention was ...”

“... of pastoral were to be found in those gardens which had been cemented over and painted green. The little men in red coats and rolled-up sleeves who turned the windmills were motionless, sunstruck.   The street in which his parents lived ran straight and shopless for a mile and a half, part of a single 1930s development, once despised by those ...”

“... day I remember how precarious the talks had been. Reading an article in the Daily Telegraph where David Trimble concludes his argument for a Yes vote by saying ‘we must have confidence in ourselves to face the future, not use the troubles of the past as a comfort blanket,’ I wonder how many Unionists will follow his advice. The vote will be Yes, but he ...”

“... of narrative clarity, which enables Time in a Red Coat to resonate, powerfully, in our minds. David Malouf makes no bones about going to work on his novels as if he were constructing a poem. If I may retranslate a passage from an interview quoted in a French magazine (which shows that his reputation has already spread well beyond the boundaries of his ...”

“... candidate from the minuscule parliamentary left. This strategy had worked before: last time round David Miliband nominated Diane Abbott as a candidate. In 2015 they hoped a left candidate would take away support from Andy Burnham, who was what passed for leftish, leaving the door open for Liz Kendall or Yvette Cooper. Enter Jeremy Corbyn stage left. He may ...”

“... As General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, prepares to report to Congress on 15 September on the success of George Bush’s ‘surge’, Bush himself is trying hard to talk it up and to discredit the policy of withdrawal. In a speech on 22 August to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention, he resorted to the new and risky strategy of using the example of the US withdrawal from Vietnam to support his position on Iraq ...”

“... time for dinner. ‘We can just have something quick, don’t you know. Maybe cold meat and a nice green salad and a tomato aspic that you can prepare in the morning, before you leave?’‘So, what do you conclude?’ This was a question Segal’s friend Vivian Gornick would often ask and to which she would reply: ‘I’m not in the concluding ...”