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“... to the success of Northern Irish poetry during the last twenty-five or thirty years. Ever since Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion gave the primacy of this work semi-official status in The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary British Poetry, the question has been what gives Northern Irish poets their edge. Many reasons have been advanced for the ...”

“... of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green.’ Heaney, preoccupied with ‘the government of the tongue’, was drawn into the arguments about cultural identity, language, gender and ...”

“... up in my diary:3 March 1986A commemorative programme for Larkin at Riverside Studios, arranged by Blake Morrison. Arrive late as there is heavy rain and the traffic solid, nearly two hours to get from Camden Town to Hammersmith. I am to read with Pinter, who has the beginnings of a moustache he is growing in order to play Goldberg in a TV production of ...”

“... the words of Raimundo Dusa (the dandy and brother of the abducted Corrado Dusa) and Christopher Blake (an English journalist), and through an authorial account of Tomaso, one of the terrorists, Massie with great economy constructs a history of Italy since the war, the thirty, ostensibly prosperous years of Christian Democracy, the growth of American ...”

“... persuasive case for seeing this ambivalence as central to the writings of Du Bois, Wright and Toni Morrison, and to black music. Some of the essays in Small Acts are rehearsals for The Black Atlantic, and there is a certain amount of repetition within the collection. But there are also valuable pieces on popular culture – Frank Bruno, Spike Lee, the ...”

“... Post-Enlightenment rationalism with a mystic hope of social metamorphosis inherited from William Blake. Over the next fifty years Owen sought to realise his vision in a variety of ways – as a model factory employer, as the founder of socialist communities, as a patron of trade-unionism and workers’ co-operatives, and as the sponsor of a wide range of ...”

“... designed to protect defendants or victim-led justice fuelled by an upmarket media onslaught. Blake Morrison’s review of Cathcart’s book for the Independent on Sunday is an example of the way reality has been excluded from the Lawrence supporters’ considerations. The CPS, Morrison writes, ‘wrecked the ...”

“... and moods, one can hear the KJB resonating in the work of Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison. One of the most interesting and perceptive essayists is R.S. Sugirtharajah, even though his postcolonial scrutiny of the KJB takes surprisingly bitter sideswipes at a rather good recent history of 1611 by Adam Nicolson. Sugirtharajah chronicles how ...”

“... arrived near the end of something, good musicians could hear enough of Scrapper Blackwell, Blind Blake, Leroy Carr, Son House, Skip James, Memphis Minnie, Peetie Wheatstraw and others in his playing to emulate those bluesmen and women, too. For guitarists, Johnson’s records have been a supermarket, not a country store. And the late date of Johnson’s ...”

“... jump-cuts of a career begun as a teenager when Moorcock hacked out Tarzan Adventures, Sexton Blake thrillers and camp-fire yarns of the purple sage. ‘At the age of 17, sitting in a dark little room in South London in the late 1950s,’ he wrote in the introduction to Tales from the Texas Woods, ‘I earned a wonderful living writing about an Arizona ...”

“... the connections between rock and myth absolutely plain (partly by using capital letters): JIM MORRISON FOUND DEAD IN BATH IN PARIS? Wife Clytemnestra and lover murder Troy veteran husband in bath. MARVIN GAYE SHOT BY DAD IN BEDROOM? Oedipus kills father at crossroads. HENDRIX CHOKES TO DEATH IN HOTEL? Ajax stabs himself on beach. MANAGER ROMANCES BABY ...”

“... at Hugh Gaitskell for not having any medals to wear on Remembrance Day and he loathed Herbert Morrison, his first boss in the wartime coalition, for having been a conscientious objector in the First World War, calling him ‘a dirty little cockney guttersnipe’. Macmillan’s diary is spattered with abuse of other public figures, often tinged with ...”