“... to do with the bombings. My attention​ was first drawn to the Birmingham case by my friend Peter Chippendale, who covered the trial for the Guardian. He told me he thought the wrong people had been convicted. It was ten years or so before I began to investigate the matter. In the early 1980s I persuaded Carmen Callil at Chatto and Windus to commission ...”

“... and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions about both Unionists and liberals. Among the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy ...”

“... and, as much as possible for someone living in a small town, I tried to renounce what the King James Version calls the friendship of the world (James 4.4). I tried to be polite to my parents. I studied the Bible and read devotional books, inspirational books, books by a woman who’d saved Jews from the Nazis, Corrie ten ...”

“... Orwell’s political prose to the kind of scrutiny ordinarily reserved for the novels of Henry James. John Sutherland has been reading and rereading Orwell ever since the 1954 BBC dramatisation of Nineteen Eighty-Four alerted him to the novel’s existence. So he feels under no constraint either to bless or to damn a writer whose ...”

“... he has a white-bearded hawk of a face, with the clear eyes of a fighter pilot. He made me think of James Salter and his code of taciturn manliness.But then you meet another witness who explains the big gap between ordering the death of your enemy from 15,000 feet and being in the dark in a Viet Cong tunnel. This is ...”

“... its own. Ray Charles was recording for Atlantic Records; Sam Cooke had left the Soul Stirrers; James Brown was touring with his Famous Flames. But Otis Redding wasn’t a soul singer yet. Billed as Otis ‘Rockin’ Redding or ‘Rockhouse Redding’, he sang rock and roll and remained heavily indebted to Little Richard. Bouncing around with Jenkins, who ...”

“... have lost the battle but we will win the war.’ Two messages from the SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell (who is married to Sturgeon), sent the day after Salmond was first charged, were leaked to the Westminster MP and former Holyrood justice secretary Kenny MacAskill, one of Salmond’s allies. In the first, Murrell appeared to call for pressure to be ...”

“... to fresh troubles – until the time came for a genocidal pacification, ordered by none other than James I, and Armstrong said his last good night. Nationality counted for very little, compared with family. Perpetually at feud among themselves, a community of predator victims straddled the frontier, as did a population of the defenceless: ‘The poor and those ...”

“... June Allyson as Jo, Janet Leigh as Meg, Elizabeth Taylor as Amy and Margaret O’Brien as Beth. Peter Lawford played a glamorous Laurie – indeed, the screenplay describes Laurie as looking ‘not unlike our idea of Edgar Allan Poe’. Armstrong’s Little Women is the most British and Pickwickian of the movie versions, set in a vague 19th-century ...”

“... of fiction that are outstandingly successful from a commercial point of view – Ken Follett and James Herbert, perhaps – or the most saccharine romance. Instead, it awards its prize to ‘the best novel in the opinion of the judges, published each year’. ‘Best’ is interpreted as ‘most distinguished literary performance’. The ulterior ...”

“... see: it was a physical struggle to unstick his eyelids. Thereafter he binged on the excesses of James Hadley Chase, the thrill technician guilty of No Orchids for Miss Blandish and the psychotic charms of Twelve Chinks and a Woman. Healy’s style, though it borrows the odd gestural shrug or swagger from twin-fisted romance, is his own. It is the ...”

“... already? Nothing on Carling was offered, or asked for by the fawning Bashir, and nothing on young James Gilbey of the ‘Squidgy’ tapes either. And she got a free pass on the manic telephone calls. I always wanted to know if it was true – as her male relatives went on telly to claim at the time – that she was a virgin when she got married. Nada on ...”

“... writers in this area whose achievement Dr Küng feels free to overlook: Robert M. Adams, Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny, Terence Penelhum, Alvin Plantinga, James Ross and Richard Swinburne, for example, have all made contributions far too substantial to be thus ignored. Dr Küng’s enormous apparatus of bibliography ...”

“... anyway much like it here. No, let him live. But still, what do you do if you’re a bachelor, or James Goldsmith, or a lesbian, or Welsh, or a good-looking nun, or Peter Parker, or a social worker, or a cat? You could always (well, not the cat) try taking Waugh to court. But who would want to stand up in the Old Bailey and ...”

“... they are capital fun. And fun is very important to Chesterton, who would heartily have endorsed James Joyce’s in risu Veritas. ‘The stars are funny,’ we learn from an essay in All Things Considered, ‘because they give birth to life, and life gives birth to fun.’ If you have, let us say, a theory about man, and if you can only prove it by talking ...”