“... pages are clumsily written – Connolly’s green overalls ‘stand out against the red brick wall’ where he is shot, though everyone knows he was shot sitting down – and in the end we wonder if the clumsiness is deliberate, an attempt to estrange us from the realistic mode. What else are we to make of the seven British Army bullets whistling towards ...”

“... war since 1984. The PYD denies the link, but in every PYD office there is a picture on the wall of the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who has been in a Turkish prison since 1999. In the year since IS was finally defeated in the siege of the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani, Rojava has expanded territorially in every direction as its leaders repeatedly ...”

“... the road was a battered white kiosk where a middle-aged man was selling cigarettes. On the inside wall of the kiosk was a picture of him and his 14-year-old son. The boy was called Ali Abbas. He used to sell me cigarettes until I gave up smoking in December 2003. When another suicide bomber blew himself up in Jadriyah Street – his target was never clear ...”

“... Jerome in his Study he plants his reader at the door to his own study in Quebec. There on the wall is old Saint Jerome in Nuremberg circa 1514, bundled up against the cold with his inkpot and quill, his slippers and his crucifix. Despite the centuries which have passed (to say nothing of the lion which is snoozing on the floor), we could still walk into ...”

“... was found in the US mailbag at 46 Lower Belgrave Street in London there has been no new evidence. Patrick Marnham’s only novelty is the evidence from Taki, the Spectator gossip-columnist, to the effect that he knew Lucky Lucan had a powerboat and had made dummy runs with an eight-stone sack to the coast. That fits with Lucan’s remarks to Greville Howard ...”

“... in 2013? With Welsh being the best-known chronicler of underclass addiction, and St Aubyn in his Patrick Melrose books documenting the ravages of the same habits in a more privileged milieu, there’s a hint of condescension here. There are open seams in the plotting. Katherine’s besotted editor, Alan, works on her new novel, Consequences, till the last ...”

“... the only regular service offered here. Ignoring the ancient injunction bidding them from the wall to ‘Commit no nuisance,’ these time-honoured figures stage a performance of their own. They hurl insults at the concertgoers, begging money from them obscenely, and urinating over their smart cars. My sleeve was taken by a man who dragged me into the ...”

“... of people at a fashionable resort. Love Always, too, offers a deadpan bug-on-the-wall view of the denizens of a trash culture. Beattie’s characters are obsessed, not with being themselves, but with their particular choice of alter ego, role model, screen identity, surrogate persona or fetish. In theory, Nicole’s arrival from Los Angeles ...”

“... house and dropped a bomb. It fell on a corner of the building, near a water tank, bringing down a wall near where Ahmed was standing. ‘I didn’t lose consciousness,’ he said. ‘After a few moments, I realised I was injured. I partly walked and partly crawled to a small temporary clinic nearby, but they couldn’t treat my leg properly.’ The medics ...”

“... or what remains of it, on display nearby, or the hobnailed boot from Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall. There’s a certain pathos to the solitary sock: it’s easy to imagine it being overlooked in the hubbub of striking camp and left behind when the legion marched on. But it turns out that’s just my ignorant fantasy, since there’s a pair of almost ...”

“... Does anyone remember Little Me – a fictional autobiography published by Patrick Dennis 30 years ago in mockery of the self-adulatory memoirs which gushed, as they still gush, from actor-dramatists and other multi-talented luvvies? Little Me would not only conduct the symphony he had composed for the inaugural concert in the splendid new concert hall, he was also the architect who had designed the splendid new concert hall ...”

“... Steps and panels and doorway are laid out at the bottom of the museum’s main stairs. On the wall nearby is Patrick Caulfield’s 1968 screenprint Found Objects. On a plain mauve ground, a feeble collection of archaeological finds is set out: a couple of potsherds, half a dozen pebbles, a few twigs and two white dots ...”

“... the watchword of all radical, progressive or revolutionary opinion. Whether it was a matter of the wall-to-wall planning of the fully nationalised socialist economy, the liberal and pluralist arrangements of the welfare state with Keynesian economic management, or simply the protection and improvement of the environment, all ...”

“... to judge from the views of journalists who’ve worked there since the invasion. Our own man Patrick Cockburn believes it’s a ‘great mistake to go with American units and report on any Iraqi city’ because local people can’t talk frankly in front of the military. But Cockburn is clearly outnumbered by reporters who see embedding as useful. At ...”

“... inflation of the intellectual currency and the overthrow of standards, came out a year after the Wall Street crash and a year before Britain finally abandoned the Gold Standard. What, then, of Priestley’s ‘common humanity’, ‘decency’, ‘homeliness’, ‘patriotism’ and ‘strength of English life?’ Some of these terms are taken from English ...”