“... surface, a few cold drops of water brushed his legs and melted on his smooth skin. He heard a bell in the distance chime once, fading to a brief, resonant hum. His toes curled over the edge as he hesitated. ‘Right to the bottom!’ – He’s just a kid, I don’t have to listen to him. ‘Come on then!’ – Eddie says it too, though. He’s a good ...”

“... the rust from a tiny tin of primrose paint, looking in her long dress and sun hat much as Vanessa Bell would have looked had she gone in for painting Bedford vans. Miss S. never appreciated the difference between car enamel and ordinary gloss paint and even this she never bothered to mix. The result was that all her vehicles ended up looking as if they had ...”

“... the Narcissus, which had Joseph Conrad as its second mate; the Grace Harwar, which took Alan Villiers round Cape Horn; the Moshulu, up whose rigging the 19-year-old Eric Newby climbed on the last grain race from Australia. All were three or four-masted barques: one or two Port Glasgow yards specialised in this last generation of big sailing ships ...”

“... remember the smells, the chalk dust on fingers, the whump of three hundred backsides rising at the bell followed by the sound of three hundred chairs being dragged across lino. Maybe I was still there? Everything was familiar, but distorted, as though seen underwater: Jefferies himself, the other teachers, a few pupils I recognised, the school buildings, the ...”

“... Stevenson placed a ‘light’ in a model of the Skerryvore lighthouse, and he put a ship’s bell in the garden. (The original lighthouse was built by his uncle Alan, 12 miles south-west of Tiree.) Fanny put benches here and there, so that Stevenson could sit on sunny days with a writing board perched on his knee.Sir ...”

“... at more intensity in his own best novels; Gavin Ewart’s affectionate ode is almost ideally deft; Alan Bennett’s implacably wary set – piece (‘Why not something more along the lines of a biscuit barrel?’) makes one laugh a good deal more, or more festively, than most festschrift items do. In short, Larkin at Sixty gets a lot of different kinds of ...”

“... excellent footage of Your Majesty’s visit to South Africa.’ The Queen sighed and pressed the bell. ‘We will think about it.’ The prime minister knew that the audience was over as Norman opened the door and waited. ‘So this,’ thought the prime minister, ‘is the famous Norman.’ ‘Oh Norman,’ said the Queen, ‘the prime minister doesn’t ...”

“... graphic novels simply enable ‘the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad’; according to Alan Moore, they allow publishers to ‘stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel’. Moore and Satrapi, in common with many others, want their work to be ...”

“... Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy ...”

“... she had felt obliged to accept this post at Court, urged on by her father. Whenever the Queen’s bell rang (‘so mortifying a mark of servitude’) she had to hurry to attend to her. Worst of all, she was left ‘unremittingly’ in the company of Mrs Schwellenberg, the Queen’s favourite courtier and the ‘Cerbera’ guarding the regal gate. Davenport ...”

“... two coasts at once. The summit of Goat Fell on the Isle of Arran can be seen in the west, and the Bell Rock, smack in the Firth of Forth, is clear on the other side, down to the east. Walking up to the burial mound, Karl and I were approached by a herd of cattle. ‘Good, good,’ said Seamus, coming up and flicking them away. ‘A square-go in ...”

“... of the cogs and the clanking of the wheels serving to charge the moment, as did the ringing of the bell at the elevation of the Host. In matters of faith Father Jolliffe might be thought a bit of a noodle but however felicitous the pause in question even he didn’t quite identify it as the voice of God. Still, if it was not God speaking, sometimes he felt the ...”

“... squeezed his hand, saying, ‘It’s not important,’ at which point the ambulance men rang the bell. Mr Ransome has not come well out of this narrative; seemingly impervious to events he has, unlike his wife, neither changed nor grown in stature. Owning a dog might have shown him in a better light, but handy though Naseby Mansions was for the park, to be ...”

“... of viral decimation, with breakthroughs commercial and institutional (or both, in the case of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, which won the Booker Prize). At the same time the market for literary fiction has shrunk, and writers who were perhaps thrilled when bookshops began to have Gay and Lesbian sections were soon dismayed to find that their ...”

“... Aveling), ‘Life in a Country Town’ (Hopkins, 1948), ‘A Story of Provincial Life’ (Alan Russell, 1950), ‘Provincial Lives’ (Geoffrey Wall, 1992), or ‘Provincial Ways’ (Lydia Davis). No one, as far as I can see, has adopted the cousinly subtitle of Middlemarch, ‘A Study of Provincial Life’. Several translators simply delete it ...”