“... exploded on his back, moist and sour, and pine cones showered his head. He blundered across to the wood, and the clippings fell away, but now twigs and leaves and pebbles and dead branches from the trees spun at him.’ This resembles the sort of poltergeist manifestation traditionally associated with girls on the brink of sexual maturity. Later Alison ...”

“... who is trapped in an uncomfortable sadomasochistic arrangement with Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper (‘I am Frank Booth,’ the audition-cum-threat went). Rossellini’s character, ‘degraded, slapped around, humiliated’, as Ebert put it, upset the critics, though some of their remarks now read like a particular kind of pearl-clutching: how ...”

“... binding, ivory it was said, a baptism gift to ‘Jeremy’ and signed by the composer Haydn Wood – a friend of Colin’s parents, I suppose – who’d written the popular tune ‘Roses of Picardy’ in 1916. Above his signature, he’d copied out a few bars from the refrain, along with the words by Fred Weatherly. Maureen always kept a beady eye on ...”

“... talk in Northumberland of bringing back the coal mines. ‘There is still coal in the ground,’ Dennis Fancett, the chairman of a campaign group that has helped to get local railway stations reopened, said to me. ‘We never ran out of coal; it just became too expensive to mine. But now, with the price of energy having gone up so much, we’d be better off ...”