“... reason she asked at the library for something on Larkin but seeing his photograph gave the book straight back: ‘He looked too much like Sergeant Bilko.’28 January. I switch on the Antiques Roadshow where someone is showing an expert a drawing by E.H. Shepard, the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh. It’s a cartoon or an illustration dated 1942, entitled ...”

“... movement saw themselves as armed militants to the Officials’ political compromisers. For them, Michael Collins had said all there was to say about the value of words in the struggle against the Crown when he gave the oration at the funeral of Thomas Ashe, who died on hunger strike in 1917: ‘That volley which we have just heard is the only speech which it ...”

“... detailed treatment in this biography that one senses a stronger than usual urge to set the record straight. It centres on the much debated question of whether Spender can really have been, as he always claimed, unaware that Encounter was indirectly funded by the CIA and by British intelligence. Spender had become co-editor of the magazine in 1953; despite ...”

“... out of the West Bank: no signs indicate that they have left Israel. New Jewish immigrants can move straight from London or Los Angeles to a West Bank settlement just as they would move to Tel Aviv, with the same financial benefits, language instruction and low-interest mortgages. Israelis living inside the pre-1967 lines work in settlement factories, study at ...”

“... Joycean neologism.For students of tone, it’s interesting to see how long the editors can keep a straight face as, soberly and diligently, they write entry after entry, using a printed source for each and acknowledging the help of many named Joyceans. At times, you can almost hear a sigh or muffled laughter. In the Cyclops episode, there is a long, long list ...”

“... turned and looked westwards down the street. I saw, to my amazement, a coach being driven fast straight into the back of the crowd. It was a private coach, an ordinary thirty to forty-seat charabanc.’ It was carrying police officers and around twenty members of the National Front towards the town hall. Other police vehicles followed, and demonstrators ...”

“... language. The colours were too bright perhaps.7 March. Read and enjoy Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts about the lure of in-between places and the edges of cities and other communities. I feel I was on to this years ago in my play The Old Country, when Hilary, a spy in the Foreign Office, describes the venues where he met his Soviet ...”

“... stomach in Savernake Forest to line up a young mother in his gunsights (as the Hungerford killer Michael Ryan did in 1987). He is an ecologically minded clothing designer, who speaks of reclaiming camouflage rather as the community activists of 1968 (the year Blechman was born) used to talk about repossessing the town hall. As the founder and ‘creative ...”

“... was too liberal-minded for that, which meant he ran the Party well’); the future Party leader, Michael Harmel (‘the brains of the Party and one of the laziest men I ever knew. Both things came from his private income – he didn’t have to work so he just sat around and read books’); and Ruth First (‘a tremendously able woman but very arrogant ...”

“... notice there’s no attempt to offer an etymology of this word gunk or gonk, which I take to be a straight borrowing from the Donegal pronunciation of the phrase agamharc, ‘seeing, looking, having a vision’. I mull this over as I stare into the groodles or ‘bits at the bottom of a soup bowl’ in that Thai place on Oxford’s main drag, then take a ...”

“... terms that combine philosophy and the history of sexuality. Butler’s assertion that ‘gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but rather, as copy is to copy. The parodic repetition of “the original” … reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the original’ is a passage frequently quoted by gender scholars ...”

“... So many lies have been told about Liszt that the main objective must be to set the record straight. Walker doesn’t even scrutinise Liszt’s belief in the Weihekuss and he finds the whole business about Don Juan ‘pathological’. According to Walker, Liszt only ever had sex with three women, all of them married to other men: Countess Marie ...”

“... it was entirely in character that on her husband’s becoming Prelate of the Order of St Michael and St George she adopted the style of an (honorary) knight’s wife, though she had no right to it – was not wise in the management of a tough little boy and systematically denied him any display of love at all. Her own fortunes in love had been ...”

“... is a self-proclaimed Sapphist. In one chapter of this book Gingrich calls with an apparently straight face for abstention from pre-marital sex. But could anyone except an amoral child of the counter-culture have pulled off the ‘Republican revolution’? The requirements of partisanship probably have a lot to do with this apparent contradiction. As ...”

“... adventurer you cannot just browse through their journals, notes and maps. You have to look them straight in the face’ – first removing any six-inch moths – ‘to find out why they have made the hard choice between reading about adventure or living it.’ But the steaming rank animal of the armchair has the drop on people like Pelton Young: we are more ...”