“... doubt the dominant figure within Sinn Féin – ‘the most important Irish Republican since Michael Collins’, as Sharrock and Devenport put it – his character, history and intentions are crucially important. What we need to know is what the authors ask in their title: is he a peacemaker or a warmonger? Gerry Adams was born in West Belfast in October ...”

“... by parasites and symbiotes. The Face, which seemed to have hit the wavelength of the high-spending young, was as vulnerable to having its style imitated as a fashion house with a hot spring collection. Advertisers copied it and other magazines, from the Tatler to City Limits, commissioned a Brody look: his was the style of the readers they wanted. The ...”

“... it. The origins of the so-called ‘set’ lay in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the bunch of young men, mostly from New College, Oxford, whom Lord Milner summoned or took with him to rebuild South Africa after the Boer War. With their mission completed by the foundation of the Union of South Africa, they returned to England but maintained some cohesion ...”

“... he ever completely forgets about us.’ Always, always, ever, in this eloquent translation by Michael Hofmann. She knows how it is with fathers: Sometimes my father loves us, and sometimes he doesn’t. When he doesn’t, we can’t do anything about it, my mother and me . . . Any steps we might take only have the effect of delaying even more the time ...”

“... on the news?’ asked the late comedian Bill Hicks in one of his most famous routines. ‘Today, a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there’s no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ...”

“... such excellent studies in the accurately entitled Literary Lives series (published by Palgrave) as Michael O’Neill’s Percy Bysshe Shelley (1989) or Caroline Franklin’s Byron (2000), not-very-literary biographies, some running to four hundred and more pages, continue to accumulate in the bookshops. There (presumably) they attract readers far more ...”

“... at the time of its submission a Syndic of the Press, and Watson was very rude to me, the publisher Michael Black preferred not to submit a proposal to the Syndicate. I hope and believe this is not true, and that Black, a serious Leavisian with whom I was quite genially associated for a good many years, knew me well enough to understand that such a ...”

“... note for the recent National Theatre production of The Revenger’s Tragedy, and its angry young author is further imagined as an early avatar of John Osborne. But it is Hals, with his fondness for exaggerated quirks of character and his unabashed relish of bourgeois vulgarity, who provides the best equivalent for the aspect of Middleton’s art that ...”

“... through discovering the world:They walk without turning back … Had the mature Goethe met the young Goethe at a crossroads, he might actually have failed to recognise him and might have sought to make his acquaintance … Poets with history are, above all, poets of a theme. We always know what they are writing about … Rarely are they pure lyricists ...”

“... their leopard spots, lay grounded as numb as scrolls of candied grapefruit peel. I saw myself as a young newt, neurasthenic, scarlet and wild in the wild coffee-coloured water. (‘Dunbarton’) This curves – scrolls – with animation. It easily – almost naturally – encompasses the contradictory pairings of ‘umber yellow’ and ...”

“... I know if he’d seen anything exciting: ‘The only people who are excited are the ones selling young adult vampires.’ At a booth marked THE GOVERNMENT BELIEVES IN GOD – WHY DON’T YOU? a preacher was flanked by two young women in white spandex bodysuits with wings on their backs. More angels were roaming the ...”

“... Together with the Dukes of Albemarle and Somerset he killed a beadle who ventured to oppose the young men in a brothel, and some of the King’s Horse Guards, of whom he was captain, slit the nose of Sir John Coventry. (This might have been construed as loyalty to his father on the part of Monmouth, for when a tax on playhouses was objected to in the House ...”

“... was ruled by the Spanish. After extensive research he had settled on a plot: the night before a young peasant couple are due to be married, the wedding is cancelled because a local Spanish lord has decided he wants the woman for himself. The years from 1628 to 1630 offered a dramatic backdrop: famine, military invasion and a devastating outbreak of the ...”

“... of Oxbridge intellectuals in the present-day Labour Party. It isn’t just a matter of ambitious young graduates from Oxford and Cambridge losing interest in a party which hasn’t looked like an election winner for some years. At least as important is the attitude of the rank-and-file activists who choose the Party’s Parliamentary candidates. If the age ...”

“... but not everyone’). We have only arrived at page 3 (large print and two photographs of the young Diana on page 2) when we read: During the day Patrick went to a crèche, at night he was left alone. Sometimes after leaving the coffee bar where I worked I went out dancing. Then Patrick got measles and I had to stop work. The money ran out and I sent ...”