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“... was only one way to make it work – by getting the people who knew him talking. Andrew O’Hagan Michael Wood (film critic): Those working-class lads seemed to be everywhere in British films of the 1960s, grunting and sweating their way through the class system, using sex as a narrow and repressed form of guerrilla warfare. We are often told about the new ...”

“... since 1985. Whether the truce will hold and whether it will stem the creeping ethnicisation of black politics remains to be seen. But Mandela’s public embrace of Buthelezi has inaugurated a new and intense phase of politicking within and between the two organisations. With Inkatha now poised to play a major role alongside the ANC in the negotiations for ...”

“... Two bishops side by side put pressure at long range on the pawns defending the castled Black king. My queen, ready to advance to the middle of the board, completes the threat. Black will have to weaken his defence by advancing a pawn. There are further forces I can bring into play ...”

“... who arrived in Brooklyn in the late 1970s. He came from Odessa, the USSR’s freest and most black-market town, a port that welcomed ships from beyond the socialist bloc. As a teenager Volodya would row out in a dinghy to the boats in the harbour, swapping Russian caviar for Turkish cigarettes and Greek suits. When the Odessans came to New York they were ...”

“... prime minister.By 1985, Diane Abbott was tired of parliamentary selections, of being the token Black woman on the shortlist and of being rejected. She applied to Hackney North and Stoke Newington only because her secretary at the film technicians’ union, where she was equality officer, drafted the letter for her. She was up against a popular sitting ...”

“... bright afternoon with the paths down to the river covered in untrodden snow and the Wharfe winding black between the drifts. Building at the priory must have been going on until the very eve of the Dissolution, with the uncompleted west tower begun by Abbot Moon in 1520. The confidence such plans imply still surprises me as I’ve never quite got rid of the ...”

“... boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space ...”

“... for his unusual opera, The Plumber’s Gift. David Malouf has devised a Kipling libretto, Baa Baa Black Sheep, for Michael Berkeley. Blake Morrison is, with the composer Gavin Bryars, engaged on an operatic version of Jules Verne’s story, ‘Dr Ox’s Experiment’. Gavin Ewart has provided saucy verses for Robin ...”

“... the House with the bank, but even so, during his last eight years in charge, it was in the black only twice, and that includes the year of the exceptional one-off rescue package secured by Priestley. Tooley had a fine record of play-safe productions, in which the world’s best singers could appear without needing too much rehearsal. Ironically, it was ...”

“... not have to be a corpse (‘I’m asleep, you say, possibly dead’) and also indicates a debt to Michael Longley, who wrote a similar poem about Lowry’s painting. Whereas the vertical man was supposed to carry out dynamic acts of construction, the horizontal man is open to sober acts of reconstruction and it is the latter category which dominates A Word ...”

“... feeling, they wept. Then, last night, the final twist occurred. The tribe fell upon her assailant, Michael Heseltine, and slew him, too.’ But the mere exclusion of Heseltine from the leadership seemed insufficient atonement for the unnatural enormity of matricide. Within the Tory tribe there was to be no healing, no reconciliation, no closure. This was a ...”

“... to have been participants or contemporary observers, or at least infants, in 1956. Except for Michael Korda’s lively memory of an Oxford undergraduate jaunt, they are historically serious and not only recollect but analyse emotion in tranquillity. Victor Sebestyen’s Twelve Days is well documented, based on up to date knowledge, and vividly ...”

“... children; she was well liked because she gave credit. The cloth-seller was a Tamil too, ‘a huge black man dressed in spotless white’; it was from him that the boy first heard the mysterious names pertaining to feminine attire: par-pleen (poplin), aar-gan-dee (organdie), and nen-sook (nainsook, from Hindi, ‘delight to the eye’; ‘the fabric that ...”

“... studio in Virginia. The film moves (rather in the same way as Dean’s tremendous portrait of old Michael Hamburger fondling his apples) from a world of light and vitality, glimpsed through the studio blinds, towards a final montage of grey trees against a storm-warning sky. Halfway through the exhibition one turns off into Soane’s strange shrunken ...”

“... characters bodies at all, or can’t make up their minds about them: Emma Bovary’s eyes are black in one chapter, in other chapters brown or blue. Lionel Shriver rarely lingers over physical descriptions, with one great exception: she’s highly conscious of how much her characters weigh. Her most famous novel, We Need to Talk about Kevin, is arranged ...”