“... they were Papes till then they were talking to the Nuns. Ye watched for that. Usually Papes had black hair and peelywally skin or else ginger hair and freckles.’ Catholic and Protestant children share the same swimming-pool. Kieron is afraid that if one of the crosses the Catholic children wears touches his skin, he’ll be burned. Kieron’s brother ...”

“... hanging above an implacable sea-cave. We climbed homewards up Wen crack, a near-vertical ladder of black holds as convenient as an old-fashioned route in the Dolomites. On the ledge which was now our goal, huge tumps of sea-thrift bulbed out like green brains. As Ed’s silhouette merged with the silhouette of one tump, I saw it as a thought absorbed back into ...”

“... in North Uist, where the refugees from the most violent evictions on that island lived ‘in the black moor’ before the bulk of them embarked for Glasgow and Australia. It’s turquoise with radial veins suggesting a sea-urchin – an exquisite secretion of the Hebrides. 16 May. We catch an early ferry to Barra and make for Buaile nam Bodach ...”

“... TV show Ready Steady Go!, and appeared in other films as well as Russell’s, including Alfie with Michael Caine. How much of her reputation came from her art and how much from herself is a question that haunts Kristal’s book as well as Pauline Boty: A Portrait, the catalogue for an exhibition of her work at Gazelli Art House earlier this year. Both have ...”

“... in politics’: how many aspirants for power – most recently Silvio Berlusconi, Ross Perot and Michael Heseltine – have traded under that description. On the basis of a successful business record, they have claimed to be equipped to perform startling political feats – cutting through red tape, banging heads together, turning the country round, getting ...”

“... a ‘writer’. Nor of an honnête homme. Waugh hit back by mocking Priestley’s war-time novel, Black-Out in Gretley, with its all-pull-together message and its shrewd and well-informed insistence that the Establishment and the upper-class were in many cases less than reliable and well-intentioned. Good novels, it is true, rarely endorse right thinking. But ...”

“... he clearly loved. But it is a long way from being the misty-eyed picture of a faultless hero. Black Tam o’the Binns has a reputation to maintain as a man who puts truth and objectivity before mere friendship. Faithfully, he paints in the warts alongside the beauty spots. And, God knows, there were plenty of warts. Some were simple bad manners, such as ...”

“... little time for the activities of his mother. Another investigation of the Queen of Scots, that by Michael Lynch and his team, is not aimed at the general reader, for it assumes a firm grasp of the main events of her life. It explores areas of less common interest: her court, her library, her use of her French jointure, her policy towards the house of ...”

“... triumph of the cult of personality is that it can expose its emptiness without losing its magic. Michael Rogin’s brilliant collection of essays, ‘Ronald Reagan’, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology, attempts to account for and destroy this magic by restoring the two dimensions it has effaced: history and psychic interiority. The title ...”

“... surveys of books that are unjustly out of print. And Sacheverell still holds his surprise niche in Michael Roberts’s classic Faber Book of Modern Verse. Sachie is also valued as the prince of self-help publishing: according to the Oxford Companion to English Verse, between 1972 and 1978 he ‘privately printed’ no fewer than 43 collections of his ...”

“... the chance to speak in an unmediated first person fulfilled a more urgent necessity. It allowed Michael Herr, on assignment in Vietnam for Esquire and Rolling Stone, to write about his own terror and confusion as he drifted through the war zone, and it allowed Joan Didion, in The White Album, to weave details of her anxious upscale-Californian life into a ...”

“... Then there were the monumental bronzes: the Madonna and Child in Cavendish Square and the St Michael at Coventry, for example. These were well-liked by most people and liked very much indeed by many. Because they are whole figures, not just heads, you can see how Epstein handled poses: they tend to be solemn, formal and frontal, the palms of the hands ...”

“... however, that we are ‘now moving back to the middle’. He means that we are moving way from Michael Portillo’s pompously ignorant remarks a few days ago when he gave his Israeli hosts carte blanche to do what they liked in Lebanon. I ask with a touch of acrimony why we ever left ‘the middle’ and ring off. On the plane, I read Auden and ...”

“... Web’, which claims that language waters down the child’s vivid apprehension of roses, the ‘black wastes of evening sky’ and the drumming of soldiers. But if we try to get back behind it, Facing the wide glare of the children’s day, Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums, We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.The repetition makes the ...”

“... two, he is being consciously naive. He knows perfectly well he will be judged principally against Michael Holroyd, whose multi-volume Shaw is one of the longest, most detailed, comprehensive and highly praised biographies of the 20th century. Gibbs’s major charge against Holroyd is that he allowed himself to be taken in by Shaw’s description of a ...”