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“... rattlesnake and the mating of two bloodstock horses – are marvellously written and help ram home, as it were, the point that nature is both earthy and pitiless. Conrad Hensley’s two transfiguring moments, of being exploited and victimised in a frozen-food warehouse and of being set upon in a California penitentiary, are equally vivid. All of these ...”

“... pamphlet by Gilbert Wakefield attacking Pitt’s government for its suspension of habeas corpus at home and its conduct of the war abroad.The first disaster to overtake Johnson, however, was another of the endemic dangers of the city. Fire broke out in the back room of his shop in January 1770 and, according to the General Evening Post, ‘spread with the ...”

“... a strenuous sense of calling, but also a rigorous education When as a 16-year-old Annie returned home, it was with strong Anglo-Catholic yearnings, nurtured by a reading of the Church Fathers, and with what her mother considered an unbecomingly earnest desire to ‘serve Christ’. The best solution to such sentiments was no doubt marriage and it was in this ...”

“... by the minister from his pulpit. Magnus makes a spirited reply: ‘You call this da House o’ da Lord. Pah! It is da House o’ Oppression. A tool of da ruling classes to keep da poor fae rebelling ... ’ This outburst is injudicious. The villagers are affronted. Further incensed by the law’s delays, they seize Magnus and lock him up in a ...”

“... Country’ ones with which the Eldridge Pope brewery had adorned so many local roadsides back home. It was just more of the same stuff only a bit further up and with more lakes, except you had to call them lochs. Ireland, admittedly, was different, if only because you arrived at breakfast time feeling a bit seasick and discovered that all the postboxes ...”

“... creator of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker), the Earl of Malmesbury, the Count of Schleissen, Lord Brougham (once described as ‘the ugliest man of the present century next to Liston and Lord Carlyle’), Jung Bahadur (the Nepalese ambassador to London), Savile Morton (a journalist friend of Thackeray), Augustus Noel ...”

“... The Lord giveth​ and the Lord taketh away. Likewise François-René de Chateaubriand. Again and again, in this first volume of Memoirs from beyond the Grave, a character is introduced only for their death to be immediately announced. ‘President Le Pelletier de Rosambo, who later died with such courage, was, when I arrived in Paris, a model of frivolity ...”

“... he was teaching a class and was summoned from his desk by a caretaker, who commanded him to go home and change into a suit. ‘When I asked him what he was talking about, he said: “Harold’s spewed it.” ’ In the House of Commons, apparently, the reception was similar, with clerks flinging open the doors of the various committee-rooms to announce the ...”

“... PEP sought to embody the cool voice of reason, by drawing on a tradition going back at least to Lord Haldane’s classic, but rarely studied, and never implemented, 1918 Report on the machinery of government. In Sir Ernest Gower’s words, PEP set itself against ‘our national habit of forming opinions by emotional reaction to labels, rather than by ...”

“... inscrutable for? In some sense, to live up to a code as unexplained and as inexplicable as that of Lord Jim. Much more frontal treatment is reserved for the Spanish Franciscan missionary, Father Velas-co. It is he who believes that he understands the situation: who wheels and deals with the Japanese, tries to outwit the Jesuits, seeks to persuade the hierarchy ...”

“... of Mont St Jean they left their carriage and took in the panorama. ‘In front of the right of Lord Wellington’s centre was the farm of Hougoumont … where poor Crawford [sic] was stationed.’ On the ground ‘hats, capes & the remains of every species of army accoutrement still remained on the field & heaps of slain lay buried … beneath a slight ...”

“... at his feet’. He’s Synge’s Playboy – and, appropriately, he once played the Playboy – lord of everywhere, or so it seems to him and those around him, who have nothing to measure him by. Like most of McGahern’s novels, That They May Face the Rising Sun drops you in the middle of someone else’s conversation, leaving you to find your own ...”

“... that, his fears dispelled, he now shares our rejoicing in eternal life, the gift of that Risen Lord who here on earth he did not yet know.That’s one way to do it. In a valedictory poem published in the LRB (6 February 1986), Clive James made a similar point, though less unctuously:A bedside manner in your graveyard toneSuggests that at the last we ...”

“... of appalling solitude trying unsuccessfully to make money out of growing sisal. When he returned home at the age of 28 his father purchased for him the local metal firm of Hoskins and Sons and he settled down to a life of conspicuous ordinariness as a medium-scale Birmingham businessman. He lived with his father and stepmother until the age of 42, when he ...”

“... and to concentrate on taking Mount Kent, the vital ground above Stanley. Other than politicking at home, what possible explanation can there be of this overriding of the local commander? During their discussion of Goose Green, Hastings and Jenkins make reference to one of the unsolved mysteries of the war. They say that Argentine defenders fought back fiercely ...”