“... with yellow window frames.‘The border runs down the middle of the river – there’s a crow’s foot carved on the stone on the bridge exactly where it is,’ Johnston said. Decades of Irish weather have worn it almost away but he traced it for me with his finger. Big trucks hurtled by – this is a short cut from south Donegal to Belfast and the boats to ...”

“... of the future. Any decent cyberpunk library would include the novels of Sterling, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley and Lewis Shiner, along with the anthology Mirroshades, the casebook Storming the Reality Studio, and a growing number of academic studies like Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity. Bukatman pays extensive tribute to Gibson’s seminal role as he ...”

“... I avoid all worldly fun. Many photographs of the visionary follow, taken by her Polish father. John K. Sagatis, who died, the book alleges, as a result of the wanton neglect of an NHS hospital. These photographs of an aspiring saint are fascinating: reproduced in the degraded colour of multiple xeroxing, they turn Sister Marie into a kind of performance ...”

“... for burial in London is three thousand acres. Anyone with GCSE maths (three thousand acres ÷ six-foot plot × three bodies deep) could work out how many dead are lying around London. I don’t have GCSE maths, so I didn’t try, but, according to the Gazetteer, Highgate has 51,000 plots containing 166,000 bodies. Do the rest of the arithmetic for ...”

“... heavily on such Western travellers to Mecca as Ludovico de Varthema, Domingo Badia y Leblich, John Lewis Burckhardt and Richard Burton. While most Western reports pretended to be objective, in some cases this was a pretence only, and Peters would have been better advised to have treated Varthema’s 16th-century Itinerario as a novel about oriental ...”

“... of the Radio Age’, and acknowledges the strong effect on her of the annual Box of Delights – John Masefield’s exemplary exercise in quintessential Christmas makebelieve. Is this one source of Angela Carter’s feeling for the fantastic? What she shares with Masefield – the Masefield of the Kay Harker stories anyway – is an ability to locate her ...”

“... pressed, when Draco Malfoy has what can only be described as an epiphany. He’s standing at the foot of his bed, hand poised to drop a newly bought textbook in the trunk with the rest of his school supplies, when it hits him, like lightning, like a hex, like Granger’s slap in third year …*I became an addict when I was 14. But it wasn’t drugs, or ...”

“... grievances; an antipathy to supranational governance and political correctness. These John Bullish attitudes seem far removed from the polite Europhile paternalism we tend to associate with one-nation Conservatives.Johnson has some similar attitudes, and has a following of scary nationalists on the Tory right, but he is careful to keep a ...”

“... social democratic solution, tried by George Brown and Harold Wilson in the Sixties and by Michael Foot and Jim Callaghan in the Seventies, is the ‘social contract’ – a private deal between the Government and the unions, by which the unions trade wage restraint in return for extensions of their organisational power. As the last Government showed, such a ...”

“... 1957 the search for a pay policy intensified. Comparability became more and more of a problem; Sir John Cameron, adjudicating a railway pay claim, declared that the nation ‘having willed the end, the nation must will the means’; it was not an answer any government could for long accept. Government’s increasing concern with wages was accompanied by the ...”

“... a poet was over, though he continued to work on, and eventually published, his translations of St John of the Cross, which many consider his most important work. In 1952 he moved again, this time to Portugal, and there, in 1957, he died in an automobile accident, in a car driven by his wife. Campbell has been called a Romantic (though he himself disliked the ...”

“... odd fish?’ Severn also asked, and Crane’s book is an attempt to answer that question. Edward John Trelawny was born in 1792 and died in 1881. In his later years he was a legendary figure, farouche and craggy, a solitary survivor from an epoch which already seemed fabulously remote: here, living on deep into the later Victorian age was a man who had once ...”

“... white glasses who would rather be a gay man), Barbie’s Queer Accessories nonetheless keeps one foot high on the moral ground of traditional liberalism, obeying only half of Oscar Wilde’s First Rule of Camp: to ‘treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.’ Another ...”

“... 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 apologetically, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t, Peter,’ I looked at the second man. Only his clothes ...”

“... in the Fifties, but which have since become available. Substantial biographies of Lawrence by John Mack and Jeremy Wilson, in 1976 and 1989 respectively, have denigrated Aldington’s achievement. Nevertheless he got quite a lot right and it was never again going to be possible to treat Lawrence as simply the preux chevalier, the schoolboyish hero of ...”