“... hasn’t bothered to examine, shows that his father, William Robert Archer, lived at 48 Highbury Grove, then a North London boarding-house owed by one Mrs Rhoda Bowness. His occupation is given as ‘journalist’. The mother, Lola Howard Archer, lived separately over the Thames at a now-vanished address in Southwark – 18 Nelson Square – which was bombed ...”

“... ideas they’re objecting to as much as the words. That was certainly the case in the furore over Richard Eyre’s film version of Harrison’s poem V. when it was shown on Channel Four with none of its expletives deleted.* Campaigners against the film claimed to be horrified by its vulgar tongue but the vulgarity of the author’s origins and politics were ...”

“... Both were commissioned by the London County Council, as it cleared slums in Poplar and Ladbroke Grove respectively. The cult of the buildings is owed partly to their stark silhouettes, with their strongly emphasised service towers connected to the flats by skyways, and partly to the workmanship that went into them. Goldfinger’s alleged arrogance, attested ...”

“... machinist and carpenter in Colorado, farmer in Kansas, hotel proprietor and orange-grove owner and mail carrier in Florida’, as the historian Steven Watts records it, before five more cross-country moves in Walt’s lifetime. The son was made to earn money for the family, carrying newspapers, selling on the railroads, even peddling butter to ...”

“... the figurative sea-god might have had in mind, ‘Taenarum, or the waters of Lerna, or the grove of Hyantian Onchestus, or to the Isthmian games’, but just in case our appetite for topography is still unsatisfied he continues with three more places he might be driving on to afterwards, ‘Calaureia, the Rock of Haemonia, or woody ...”

“... Sonoma County goat cheeses and one of the finest semi-soft goat cheeses in the world, the Cypress Grove Humboldt Fog; the Slow Food movement gathers strength throughout the world and reinforces the revival of the local and the seasonal. If one characteristic expression of late modernity is the globalised standard, another is the value increasingly placed on ...”

“... be smitten with Skipper, a gay man eighteen years her junior. A good-looking, rich white Bahamian, Richard Roberts strung her along, joining in her flirtatious games, then swiftly offloaded her. Her sister Hilary told her to ‘grow up’, in other words, to give up.Byrne convinced me that Pym loved and suffered. ‘Pouring out her heart’ in her novels may ...”

“... and the elaborate justifications he might one day need to defend them. After a Captain Grove, whom Pepys helped secure a desirable posting, handed him a letter, he writes: ‘I discerned money to be in it and took it’ – a gold piece and £4 in silver. But no less important to Pepys was the performance of his own honesty: ‘I did not open it ...”

“... the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Guardian’s defence correspondent, Richard Norton-Taylor, sends me an email from London which he received from Simon Wren, an MoD press officer. Wren is ranting about my colleagues’ earlier reports on how soldiers haven’t got enough toilet paper, aren’t getting decent food and haven’t got ...”

“... to snip a pink bud, one petal uncurling, and three hulking girls came out of the rhododendron grove, oddly sheepish, hunched in light manilla- coloured raincoats. We stood regnant in our rose garden and stared them down. They shambled, in whispered converse, to the formal garden of white peonies & red geraniums, stood at a loss under a white ...”

“... The Thames underwrites a narrative of royal escapes, murdered princelings, futile rebellion. Richard II is rowed downstream to confront Wat Tyler and his peasant army. Unable to call on anything as formidable as the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step ashore. ‘Rough, rude men’ had been sent ‘all over the ...”

“... was bestowed still the greatest honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or ...”

“... from the other children as a literary sissy like Yates [sic] and Masters.’ In an interview with Richard Poirier for the Paris Review in 1960, a few years before his death, he reiterated that he hadn’t had ‘a very literary life’; he didn’t keep up with reviews or gossip. He told Poirier that when he first visited Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in ...”

“... as she was putting on her boots to go out to a point-to-point – if they were both at Birch Grove, Macmillan’s house in Sussex, they would meet for dinner and then go their separate ways. Macmillan remained haunted by the affair. In 1975, he went to see Boothby at his flat and asked, for the sake of his peace of mind, to know the truth one way or ...”

“... to Palestine had fallen for another man, and he was condemned to ‘dirty work’ in an orange grove – what was worse, his boss was an Arab. He soon came down with malaria. ‘I am living alone today,’ he wrote to his father on his twentieth birthday. Yet for all his misery, he refused to join those ‘mummified Jews’ who were running back to ...”