“... Jock Stewart, I’m a canny gun man’ (from the traditional ‘I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day’). Joan Baez’s contralto can, if you squint your ears, pass as a farm-boy tenor; Cait O’Riordan’s chalky delivery might be that of a rich ponce.Their trip is a narrative device that lets the novel get trippy. It’s now a critical text analysing ...”

“... not have anything to do with miracles’. In a dissent from that same year, he declared: ‘Day by day, case by case, [the court] is busy designing a constitution for a country I do not recognise.’ As the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd put it, ‘He’s so Old School, he’s Old Testament.’ Scalia certainly ...”

“... damage they have caused her, with poetic feeling and a sustained and controlled intensity. Robin Daley’s father was a US Navy pilot, constantly away from home and the victim of his grand obsessions with flying and drinking. Known as ‘The Commander’, he was fun to go out with (‘I’ll fly, you navigate,’ he would say to his daughter on their ...”

“... Serb neighbours said not to worry – it was just there to observe us. But by lunchtime the next day a teenage girl lay dead in the street. Then another 15 people were killed. They told us to run into the woods and they started shooting us.’ I asked them so many questions about what they had seen. ‘What happened when your brothers were shot?’ ‘How ...”

“... notice but they won’t necessarily notice what it is they’re noticing. ‘Kill,’ whispered Robin, edging past the women into the tiny front garden; ‘Die, megazord,’ and he crushed a snail shell beneath his shoe. Half hidden beneath the windowsill he crouched in a hero’s cave. Across the dangerous river of the front path he had to save his ...”

“... brought low by the strain of living up to his own avant-garde aspirations. The main character, Robin, is a depressed graduate student who lives in Coventry and spends most of his time avoiding his supervisor, who’s just published a book called The Failure of Contemporary Literature. Robin writes stories that lightly ...”

“... Daughter of the Circus, Clonskea, The Liffey, Swim, In the Tram, The Bar, The Donkey Show, A Fair Day, Mayo, Islandbridge Regatta, Crossing the Metal Bridge, The Quiet Man and The Harvest Moon. A favourite of mine is an earlier work, a watercolour, Not Pretty but Useful, of a boxer sitting in his corner. I can’t say anything especially wise about these ...”

“... morning under Southwell’s swarthy, prolific leaves an imp in a fissure of oak might have been Robin Hood.    * It was not for us. It was death, for sure, though the men came back empty-handed, grinning, and stacked their long poles in the yard. They understood when we packed and paid. There were other towns under the sun, plenty, if we could hurry ...”

“... There wasn’t the remotest chance that his closely argued diatribe would see the light of day. The essay, I soon discovered, was a feeble echo of Seabrook as monologuist, motormouth. He doesn’t drive, but he talks like a minicabber. Over his shoulder. Opinions on everything. My visitor was a rare spirit, left over from the age of Gissing, an ...”

“... government: ‘Bollocks, Cohen. What about the landmines?’ What about the landmines? On 12 May Robin Cook announced the Government’s first leftward shift. Labour would abandon Tory foreign policy, whose futile cynicism had been dissected in the Arms-to-Iraq inquiry. Britain’s relations with the rest of the world would now have ‘an ethical ...”

“... and oil-stained corpses: Presently I saw two men crawling on the ground … I recognised one as Robin. His left foot was smashed to pulp, mingled with the remainder of a boot. But as I spoke to Robin saying, ‘Have you got a tourniquet, Robin?’ and he answered ...”

“... I am personally more attracted by Susan Forward’s modestly presented case-histories than by Robin Fox’s pretentious fantasies, but there is more meat for discussion in the latter’s argument, so let us start there. Once, long ago, Robin Fox was trained as a British social anthropologist. He has published two ...”

“... Social Chapter, followed by the restoration of the Civil Service unions to GCHQ. Then came Robin Cook’s declaration in favour of a landmine ban – achieved by the simple, but effective, technique of failing to inform the Ministry of Defence in advance. Then there was the cancellation of the deportation order against the adopted Nepalese, Jay ...”

“... One day in 1950 I walked down Crown Passage, an alley between King Street and Pall Mall, to call on the Falcon Press in pursuit of money they owed me. The managing director Peter Baker had left letters unanswered and telephone calls unreturned, and sure enough he was out. I saw instead a harassed long-nosed man in a blue suit who said his name was Paul Scott, and that he was the company secretary ...”

“... of an architect’s model, not designed for real life. In Brutalist Paris, Nigel Green and Robin Wilson praise the ‘important architectural interventions’ that resulted in ‘an often radical departure from the familiar, historical Paris, towards the establishment of multiple satellite centres’. But few of the buildings have weathered well. In ...”