“... tends to blunt the special and original thrust of the book, that 3000-mile voyage of the great white birds. Fiennes often meets them en route, of course. He arrives at Sand Lake in northern South Dakota on the same day as 340,000 snow geese. He sees them flying in from the south ‘in long skeins and echelons that crossed and undulated, or appeared, by a ...”

“... fantasy of racial degeneration. Luckily the hearties don’t have it all their own way. Michael Crick’s and David Smith’s book describes how, at the same time as Stan Cullis was assembling his Wolves team, Matt Busby at Manchester United was embarking on a managerial career uniquely committed to attractive attacking football. The triumph’n ...”

“... notion of him at Number Ten has much the same surrealist feel as the idea of Jesse Jackson in the White House ... If Labour is serious about winning, Kinnock has to go.’ This was truth-telling with a vengeance. Since, Johnson concluded, the British electorate were used to authority-figures with an Oxbridge background the Labour Party could do worse than ...”

“... Britain into Europe’ had a public relations problem. Is that still the case? Are Hugh Thomas and Michael Heseltine right in arguing that Britain’s leaders are now lagging behind public opinion in Europeanism or, at the very least, that they are failing in their duty to enthuse us? That two Conservative public figures should, within a space of three ...”

“... In the Woody Allen movie Hannah and Her Sisters Eliot (Michael Caine) contrives to cross paths on a Manhattan street with his sister-in-law. Lee (Barbara Hershey), with whom he has fallen in love. He pretends to be hunting for a bookshop: she shows him the way to it and there he finds, as if by chance, E.E. Cummings’s Collected Poems, which he insists on buying for her ...”

“... His father, Squire Haggard (a crusty fellow, but otherwise unlike the old villain invented by Michael Green), had viewed him as fit only to be a greengrocer. The post found for him was that of junior aide to the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal. Within two years, as a sort of legal odd-jobs man, he had been deputed to raise the Union Jack for the first time ...”

“... dislike (not envy) of Graham Greene, on these grounds, emerges in a couplet from Byrne: And white men go to pieces, as we’ve seen, In overlauded trash by Graham Greene. Greene achieved a bogus newness, in Burgess’s view, by laboriously making grace and sin the novelties of a kind of fiction which was no more than the old sentimental sensationalism ...”

“... Mother is called Mary or Dana or Bridget or the Captain of the Armies of Heaven is called Lug or Michael? Why, Willy, it was you yourself who taught me these things.’ In this respect, Maud Gonne belonged to a period in which a good many emancipated women, or women desiring emancipation, combined a passion for social or national justice with an interest in ...”

“... years at the offices of Horizon. ‘Understandably, Connolly was never comfortable with Kavan,’ Michael Sheldon wrote in Friends of Promise, his book about Connolly. He was presumably referring to her heroin addiction. Friends and mentors over the years – Rhys Davies. Peter Owen, Brian Aldiss – have made considerable efforts to dispel such feelings of ...”

“... has continued: later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various factional groupings and dining clubs, such as Nick’s Diner, the Lollards and the Tory Reform Group.The ...”

“... hum of iron tearing soil in my hands, the hollow click of steel smashing into Surlyn that made a white-haired woman oooh, made her leather-skinned husband whistle.’ Timmy is invited to join other precocious golfers at a training camp in North Carolina which hothouses talented kids. He is chary of the cost for his parents – ‘the price was more than my ...”

“... and the war in Kosovo that were manifestly being driven principally from 10 Downing Street and the White House. He also had to sit tight and accept a great many heavy-handed attempts to impose the will of Number 10 on local Labour organisations – the Welsh Assembly and the London mayoral contest were notable examples. Well before the 2001 election, John ...”

“... this is one thing we know for sure – we will be absent; a nationalist, nativist anxiety that (white) English kids will lose their identity when they are forced to become cosmopolitan citizens of the world (and therefore ‘citizens of nowhere’ as Theresa May would say); a theological fear that the children of God are becoming lost in the secular void ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... shops closed as the demonstrators had requested and several local factories with mixed or majority white workforces voted to strike. Central Southall was now under the control of several thousand police officers, who set up cordons around the town hall. By 3 p.m. there were already several hundred local residents stuck outside the cordons, and not allowed to ...”