“... rugby shirt and jeans speckled with paint from his mother’s new house. ‘They’re not thinking straight,’ he said. ‘Our product needs to be marketed – branded, with a flag, which is presently not allowed. It’s all wrong. We have to import soya as a protein source for our pigs now because we can’t use other animal meat or bone fat. But this ...”

“... other writers.’ As Gelpi rightly points out, Day Lewis did always have his defenders. Early on, Michael Roberts claimed that From Feathers to Iron (1931) was ‘a landmark, in the sense in which Leaves of Grass, A Shropshire Lad, Des Imagistes and The Waste Land were landmarks’. And on the occasion of his death, Kingsley Amis declared that Day ...”

“... the summer games). Two years later, the England cricket team ‘took back’ the Ashes after eight straight defeats to Australia. The Northern Irishman Rory McIlroy won a couple of majors and became the number one golfer in the world. Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France. Then came the London Olympics, about which there was a lot of national grumbling, until ...”

“... she quoted an exchange between Joan of Arc and her interrogators about her vision of the archangel Michael: ‘How did you know that it was St Michael?’ ‘By the way he spoke and his language of angels.’ ‘How did you know it was the language of angels?’ ‘I soon believed it was. I wanted to believe that it ...”

“... rather than hole-in-corner Victorian adultery is arresting. Ackroyd suggests that there was no straight sex, no intercourse, certainly no love child. This is not entirely new-fangled: Michael Slater in Dickens and Women (1983) pointed to a number of glaring holes in the received view and argued for the possibility of an ...”

“... wrote the Companion entry knows, but didn’t have space enough to do more than put the record straight as to paternity. Here and elsewhere it would have been welcome if the publishers could have allowed more space to the contributors. The feminist element in the enterprise involves more than resurrecting – as the Companion does very ably – legions of ...”

“... water. As you walk through the Yosemite valley with the colossal front of El Capitan standing up straight and steely to your left and the hunched mass of Tissiack (Half Dome) to your right, its curve sheared off frontally, you feel your shoulders brace and your brain contract as though you were having to hold apart the irresistible gravity and closure of the ...”

“... and – if you were female, or an ambivalent male – darkly unsafe. ‘He was lovable,’ Michael Young said, ‘because he did not mind whether he was loved or not.’ Of course, this was artifice: he craved popularity and acclaim as much as any performer; but he was also capable of standing back and appreciating the wider picture. If clever people ...”

“... a long flight to Jakarta. ‘Eric Lustbader?’ suggested Sean, and I shook my head. I’d seen Michael Herr sending dispatches. The hours flew by. The Beach is studded with non-cinematic references to popular culture of the same Eighties vintage: Atari and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David Attenborough’s Life on ...”

“... vote reflected national percentages almost exactly. But in 1988 it produced a higher vote for Michael Dukakis, against George Bush, than any other state bar one. The residents of Sherman Hill attest to a strong left-wing strain in Iowa’s politics which has been influential and may be so again. They worry about health, education, environment, with the ...”

“... deafening her with ear-splitting rolls of thunder ... Then already hopelessly soaked, she stood up straight, offering her body to the powerful surge of water. For an instant the thought crossed her mind to run wherever her feet took her, away from the man who was waiting for her in the green cave [of the haystack], but she knew she wouldn’t.’ And so, a ...”

“... way in which they are compelled to fulfil their ‘evil fortunes’. ‘Evil fortunes’ is not a straight translation of Dante’s ‘sad pass’, nor does ‘accursed’ convey the complex, almost benign understanding in Dante’s line about the book the lovers were reading when they fell: Galeotto fu’l libro e chi lo scrisse. A work of gallantry and ...”

“... With no more murmurs in the Liberal ranks In Labour’s there is total consternation. If Michael Foot tore out his hair in hanks He could not look more prone to perturbation. The right wing loudly calls the left wing cranks And no one stays calm in the altercation Except for Tony Benn, who sucks contentedly On his prop pipe and stares ahead ...”

“... specific to period and place: the Rev. Henry Rich is described on the first page as coming ‘straight out of Mansfield Park’, and it is a matter for debate whether he succeeds in emerging from that rarefied world. It is partly because Henry Rich’s obsession with Time – which at one point he characterises as moving in our imaginations from left to ...”

“... Parliament, is out of the question. But wait. Anyone who concludes that the Bingham Report is a straight cover-up for the Bank is making a big mistake. Despite its moderate tone and its reluctance to condemn out loud, the report is a long catalogue of carelessness on the part of the Bank, the auditors and the other agencies responsible. Again and ...”