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“... I happened to read Michael Barber’s rather off-beat and amusing biography of Anthony Powell while waiting for a delayed easyJet flight from Stansted to Belfast and enduring all the usual privations of short-haul, low-cost flying: being shunted from gate to gate, and from sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge to sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge; and being jostled, and jostling, on this occasion in the very burly company of the young men and women of the Scottish Gymnastics Display Team, and an elderly couple, both in wheelchairs, and a man tattooed from neck to wrist, and possibly lower, who was working his way loudly through a large box of Quality Street ...”

“... that he has deprived his children of their sense of place. His book, From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish, includes criticism, personal essays and even a piece of fiction. Wall says his book is a hybrid because he is one, too. His interest is in the points at which Irish and Irish-American culture intersect and his study shows the ...”

“... surrender and the overthrow of the kaiser. ‘Again,’ he later wrote, ‘everything went black before my eyes.’ And so it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations; in vain the hunger and thirst of months which were often endless; in vain the hours in which, with mortal fear clutching at our hearts, we nevertheless did our ...”

“... visit to the clinic. The rest of the novel consists of dialogue between Alicia and her doctor, Michael Cohen, taking place over several sessions in the weeks leading up to her suicide. By comparison with The Passenger, with its cryptic lapses into memory, dream and flashback and all its dangling plot threads, Stella Maris is alarmingly ...”

“... of the Halloween massacre – Milltown excites a special frisson; a sense of desecration, perhaps. Michael Stone, a hero to many Loyalist paramilitaries, ran amok among the tombstones with grenades during a set-piece Republican burial. On the day of another, two plainclothes members of the security services were dragged from a car, stripped, beaten and ...”

“... that he and his ever-supportive wife Joy had done for a major historical novel, People of the Black Mountains. Then we laughed over the paperback reissue of his first novel, Border Country, with the old signalman, Harry Price, on its front cover: the artist had endowed Price with Williams’s own unmistakable features. That now seems painfully close to ...”

“... trial. But his name comes in handily because it has been coupled with MacCaig’s. This was by Michael Schmidt, who pointed out that the sort of figurative writing associated with Raine, patented as ‘ludic’, had been practised by MacCaig from long ago. What Schmidt had in mind must have been something like ‘Running Bull’: All his weight’s ...”

“... but the treatment is not solemn. The tone is that of serious comedy, with occasional glimpses into black holes. We are not in Greeneland, among lugubrious and spectacular adulteries, sacrilegious communions and whisky priests; we are not in Waugh territory, gaping at the raffish pieties of the aristocracy; we are in middle middle-class Catholic England, where ...”

“... commission to investigate the detention policy in Guantánamo and all the so-called ‘black sites’, and go on to raise the possibility of compensation when rights have been clearly violated. Which covers most of the cases in this study. Money, it turns out, is not simply an issue to be faced at the point of release. It is present throughout the ...”

“... makes it hard to be as funny about them as they are when they’re left to their own devices. But Michael Frayn is among the honoured few who have succeeded. I fondly remember a piece of his from the 1960s (about fog) that purported to be a newly discovered fragment of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein generally writes with a ...”

“... Just outside Durban lies the vast black squatter camp of Inanda, whose huddling shacks house half a million people or more – the only way to perform a census is to take an aerial photograph and allow for six people per shack. On Inanda’s eastern edge lies the historic Gandhi Settlement, founded by the Mahatma before he set off to lead the struggle against the British in India ...”

“... comically reactionary Liberal prime minister John Howard to inveigh against what he called the ‘black armband’ view of his country’s history (as opposed to the proud Gallipoli view), which launched the popular debate that became known in Australia as the ‘history wars’. The main argument was over the number of natives directly killed by the ...”

“... to the title. Whiteness as ubiquitous and banal, its excess evident in the seepage beyond the black borders of the US. Jaune Quick-To-See Smith’s crafty layering in Fifty Shades of White echoes the creation of this elaborate fiction, a fiction that continues to exercise an extraordinary, destructive power. I am reminded of the first maps I saw as a ...”

“... subjects) with his stubbly, slightly stooping distrust of the camera. The curled and freckled Mr Michael Rooney, who in his smock and kerchief seems to look at us straight out of a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph from the 1860s. The long-necked poise of Mrs Barbara Hyslop, the intimate textures of dark hair and fine wool. Much like the portrait sitters for ...”

“... were the only reality – not that one could believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw ...”