“... there quickly as we could and, you know, everything was very calm and peaceful. England lay like a green carpet below me and the war seemed worlds away. I could see Tunbridge Wells and the sun glinting on the river, and I remembered that last weekend I’d spent there with Celia that summer of ’39.   Suddenly Jerry was coming at me out of a bank of ...”

“... is now writing a soon-to-be-bestselling crime novel with plenty of sex and murder. Her husband, Robert, often rudely called ‘Rob’ by unthinking friends, is a highly adapted commuting machine who works in Canary Wharf and times his drive to the station to perfection. She is interesting, he is not. And they have a child, Lanny, who is both interesting and ...”

“... offered her a retainer of a thousand pounds a year: ‘Let me know how funny you think this is.’ Robert Yeatman (who took over as Spark’s editor at Macmillan) once dared to query the phrasing of a single sentence in The Girls of Slender Means and was told: ‘It’s exactly what I intend, and the style is my own. I’m sorry if you don’t like it; but ...”

“... It looks a picture of tranquillity, with a circle of red brick buildings around a village green. The walled compounds contain family houses, barns and stables; there is no way to tell if a house is Serb or Albanian. The dirt road from the village runs down to the Pristina-Pec highway, now controlled by the KLA. In one direction is Kjevo, where Serb ...”

“... in 1935: ‘My heart always warms to people who do not come to see me, especially Americans.’ To Robert Bridges there is a judicious criticism of Hopkins (sprung rhythm is not difficult to write well, but Hopkins writes it badly) and he thanks Witter Bynner for admiring ‘my poems even more than I admire them myself’. The show-off element is strong, and ...”

“... The Grapes of Wrath is an appallingly hollow posture of stoicism; The Informer risible; How Green Was My Valley a monstrous slurry of tears and coal dust; Tobacco Road meandering nonsense; Three Godfathers shameless; and The Fugitive inane. Mister Roberts is pious; Gideon boring; The Long Gray Line monotonous. Stagecoach is sometimes cited for its ...”

“... he could have been another Beefheart. Instead, he peeled off into racist millennialism, the Green Room at San Quentin, the TV interviews – in which he looks like a wasted George Best carved out of rotten marzipan. Manson’s career proves, if nothing else, that satire has a strictly enforceable shelf-life. The high-risk conclusion to Watson’s epic ...”

“... whom he greatly admired. (For example, seeking a stanza form suitable for his elegy on Robert Gregory, he silently adopted that used by Cowley three hundred years earlier in his verses on the death of William Harvey.) On the whole it was probably just as well that Trinity, the Ascendancy college, was barred to him. He often complained of the ...”

“... and mauve, black and white stars’, and that a semi-tone higher it suggests ‘pale, prairie-green foliage, with patches of blue, silver and reddish orange’. The composition might suggest these things, but surely not the mere mode it uses. But even if this was partly a tease (when Claude Samuel reacted with astonishment to some of his ...”

“... four children, on 6 January 1916, three months before the Easter Rebellion, in which her father, Robert Brennan, served as a commandant in the Irish Volunteers. Following the surrender ordered by Pearse, he was sentenced first to death and then to penal servitude for life but was released soon after and went on to organise the Department of External Affairs ...”

“... wrong, you’re facing more than just your opponent. In a match against Korchnoi, Spassky wore a green eyeshade and sat at a distance from the table in order to thwart Korchnoi’s mind-bending rays. During the Reykjavik match, the Russians dismantled Spassky’s chair to find out if it had been tampered with by the Americans. In chess mythology, the ...”

“... Invisible ink … Trampolines/aniseed sweets/painted eggs. Pencil sharpenings? Magic Faraway, Robert the something, Robert the Rose Horse?’ The bereaved man is convinced by this performance, even marginally consoled: ‘Thank you Crow.’ ‘All part of the service.’ ‘Really. Thank you, Crow.’ ‘You’re ...”

“... was parked described it. What I remember is seeing flashing lights of all colours: red, blue, green and a horrendous noise that actually went right down into your body. But there was like a vacuum after that, there was silence and then all of a sudden there was this swishing sound and everything just went berserk … and then we saw it in its full ...”

“... as, for example, in his demonstration in the House of Commons after the assassination of the Rev. Robert Bradford and his subsequent call for a campaign of passive disobedience to force the British out. Of necessity, the leap of faith is informed or sustained by an idea of martyrdom. Paisley comments that Christ makes frequent references to his death as ...”

“... Security Council responsible for covert operations, had given the CIA station in Léopoldville the green light and wired Devlin $100,000 to finish the job.Kennedy’s​ arrival in the White House signalled a shift in American foreign policy. As a senator he had been critical of France’s undeclared war in Algeria. Now he shocked the Washington establishment ...”