“... The father manhandled René out of the garden onto the public pavement. The other young man came close behind, more interested in asking questions before committing himself to a brawl, and so did the woman. I took her on one side and gave her the spanner, explaining that we had not been making an unprovoked assault on Kevin. By this time there was a mêlée ...”

“... Giles/Peter Lorimer clones without the talent’*: players who deny opponents space, close people down, tackle as violently as they can, and generally run around like headless chickens. This is called work-rate. Don Revie became manager of England. The other hearty tenet is adherence to a tactic called ‘the long ball game’, also known as ...”

“... of the judiciary, both north and south of the Tweed. The judges are attacked for their tendency to close ranks, for their refusal to disbelieve Police evidence at its most suspect and for a determination to maintain a belief in infallibility rather than a faith in justice. Lord Denning’s report on the Profumo case was ‘a disgrace’, full of tittle-tattle ...”

“... with ‘I may be gone for some time.’ Roth’s titles have often teased with implied offers of frank confession: Reading Myself and Others. The Ghost Writer, ‘My True Story’, etc. In the preface to the last Peter Tarnopol solemnly announced that something truer than true was on its way: ‘Presently Mr Tarnopol is preparing to forsake fiction for a ...”

“... work with the secret political police – his eyes, ears and armoury – is crucial. Stalin’s close colleagues also knew that he kept a black notebook in which he made regular entries. Immediately after learning that Stalin had died, Lavrenti Beria rushed to the leader’s office, opened his safe and seized the black notebook and other papers (there ...”

“... not just in his own ‘late’ period) with direct or indirect consequences for composers from Frank Bridge to Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr (both the last mentioned have matured into a style informed by a concept of modal tonality), and from Messiaen to Pierre Boulez – whose orchestral Rituel in memoriam Maderna (1974) rescinds ‘total ...”

“... heroines on the boards ... Do not only go to this theatre to watch the tearful candour of these frank labourers, these honest petit-bourgeois ... Leave them to enjoy their unhappiness. They are so happy in their despair! For those who learned to choke back their tears most of the time, letting go could be violent: convulsive shudders and wrenching sobs ...”

“... Elsewhere he writes: ‘I would like to say how grateful I am to all those with whom I have been close over the years in the little town of Queanbeyan – they have helped me get where I am today.’ Which is some way away from Queanbeyan. He has been bounded by the game, rather as he has been bounded by the error of his brilliant ways. To compound his ...”

“... narrow focus, in the way that these few poems, produced over many years, should have settled so close by one another, with their themes of break-up and breakdown, their shattered atmosphere, their identical reference points of hands and heads and hair and flowers and grass and snow and shadow. That ‘silence on other subjects’ that Brecht mentioned in a ...”

“... Letter C’; it reappears in Chapter Nine, entirely concerned with American poetry and comparing Frank O’Hara with Ed Dorn (not the expected names? No, thank heaven); and in Chapter 11, where three English poets who normally trade in pathos are applauded for at one point departing into anti-pathos – Ted Hughes in Crow, Geoffrey Hill in Mercian Hymns and ...”

“... before Christ was crucified. Yeats came to O Rathaille, or to this line of his, with the help of Frank O’Connor. Introducing O’Connor’s name, John Jordan introduces a writer who won a particular fame as a translator of Irish as well as a more widely acknowledged renown as a short-story writer in English. The translator has been of extraordinary ...”

“... which may readily be understood. But then there had been other such pangs as my book drew to a close: every few months came a further contribution – not a few of them from the pen of Martin Amis – to a subject which is widely supposed to be exhausted. To suppose it exhausted is not to be unable to suppose that its new works may be pathfinders: the ...”

“... man in Cairo: ‘family’, as Hillary Clinton put it. (The Clinton and Mubarak families have been close for years.) So long as he opened the economy to multinationals, achieved high growth rates and honoured his foreign policy commitments – allowing swift passage for US warships through the Suez Canal, interrogating radical Islamists kidnapped by the CIA as ...”

“... and coincidences that have influenced her life. Writing an autobiography is, she says, as close to a summing up, ‘a day of judgment’ when ‘the meaning of events is made clear,’ as she expects to come. In effect what she is doing, as she acknowledges, is trying to treat her own life in the way that she has treated fictional lives: to find a ...”

“... Ford said in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin (spring 2001). The lyrics in Soft Sift often come close to being strayed sonnets. Like many modern poets, from Yeats to Ashbery, Ford writes poems that don’t keep to 14 lines, but that nonetheless feel like sonnets. Here is a typical 12-line example, from a sequence called ‘Inside’, embodying a terrified ...”