“... enormous bay, its long curving marram strands, its islands and roshans and purple hills with the white quartzy dome of Errigal beyond – we stare out and agree that this must be one of the most beautiful places in the whole world. The moist light moves and zings like a Jack Yeats painting – in a different climate these immense empty strands would be lined ...”

“... government that he was attacking. His reputation gained him privileged access to the black and white radical groups operating in South Africa and in Britain (where he was sent by BOSS following a bogus deportation order). Many of those that he ‘befriended’ in South Africa he subsequently betrayed to certain imprisonment, ill-treatment and torture. He ...”

“... in Paris and started to construct his paintings as shallow reliefs, reducing his palette to white. Hepworth called his technique ‘carving out’ and must, Maclean imagines, ‘have felt in some ways that their two art forms were merging’. That year Hepworth, Nicholson and Moore were invited to join Unit One, a group of painters, sculptors and ...”

“... from The General Theory was: reflate at all costs. He got rid of not one but two chancellors – Peter Thorneycroft and Selwyn Lloyd – for refusing to expand demand fast enough. Not long after Lloyd’s restrictive 1961 budget, Macmillan was urging him to prepare a reflationary budget for 1962; two days after his 1962 effort, Macmillan was already egging ...”

“... prove that success in the movies is never any guarantee of success. He was born in 1970 (just as Peter Bogdanovich was shooting The Last Picture Show) and he is already, in 2008, gathering force as a cautionary tale. Putting careers and heartaches to one side, it is true that the anatomy of failure may be more culturally informative than the naming of ...”

“... brown hatter’. But in his third novel, Pompes Funèbres, written in 1947, the oppostions are, as Peter Coe points out in his excellent 1968 study of Genet, beginning to show worrying signs of being out of control. In Pompes Funèbres we are offered Hitler as Saviour, Nazi officer Erik Seiler as love object and an ecstasy of moaning over the ravishing of la ...”

“... he was a Job Centre counsellor and a pub bore. The man has embraced infamy like a bride. At least Peter Sutcliffe kept his mouth shut. After his arrest, Nilsen never stopped talking: letters to the Guardian, pages and pages on his state of mind for the police. Indeed, in retrospect, it is this aspect of Nilsen – his unrelenting fascination with words ...”

“... TV so far, that marks a significant moment in the gradual passage of its central character, Walter White, from hero to villain. Walter, a middle-aged high school chemistry teacher who’s become a manufacturer of illegal drugs, is walking down the aisle of a DIY superstore in his home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico, buying paint for his basement, when another ...”

“... of the work of the economist who wrote BIS’s ‘Supporting Analysis for the Higher Education White Paper’). Back in 1963, one of the most interesting and, in its way, radical proposals of the Robbins Report was that a new ministry should be created to give universities more direct representation within government. Arguing against the then fashionable ...”

“... decades since Moss was photographed by Corinne Day for the Face, those instantly iconic black and white images of a skinny 16-year-old on Camber Sands, wearing no make-up and very few clothes, grinning through her freckles and pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of ...”

“... doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is revealing, that textual arm around ...”

“... or ‘pragmatic’ criticism. This latest move runs directly counter to the way that Peter de Bolla’s book Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics wants to take Bloom’s work. De Bolla’s clear, thoughtful description of Bloom’s career thus far is followed by a rigorous development of Bloom’s diachronic theory of tropes into a ...”

“... and unusual value. How many of us, for instance, have heard of August Stramm or Hermann Löns, Peter Baum or Walter Flex? But they are, or were, as notorious in their homeland as Rupert Brooke in our own; and when Tim Cross introduces us to their lives and works – the latter usually having the pathos of schoolboy essays or prize poems – they become as ...”

“... organisation, possibly founded by Churchill during World War Two? What did Deza’s mentor, Sir Peter Wheeler (modelled on the Oxford professor Sir Peter Russell), do during the Spanish Civil War? And what about the bloodstain on his stairs? What is being set up by the narrator’s constant outing of ‘bogus ...”

“... usually explain the set-up early and clearly. The game can’t start until you know the rules. Peter Carter, falling to earth in his burning plane, accepts his designated death, but falls in love with the radio operator June and thereby somehow falls past it. The rest of A Matter of Life and Death follows from this anomalous case of physical (rather than ...”