“... masculine, in an attempt to drown out the voices of her lost past. She towers, inappropriately in white lace, over slight young men at Goodwood, or stamps down the London pavements military style, lantern-jawed, heavily upholstered, arms swinging, toes turned out. Gone are the soft smile, the curves and the sleepily sensuous eyes. Now she is angry and huge ...”

“... elected mayor equivalent to the leader of a council. Those arguing for an executive mayor included Michael Heseltine (the hammer of the GLC), the Evening Standard and Simon Jenkins, a long-standing critic of London council bungling. Opposition to the idea was led by Labour’s Environment spokesman, the former Camden councillor Frank Dobson – an irony not ...”

“... of The Old Crowd was Stephen Frears, but in real terms it was LWT and its then head of programmes, Michael Grade. Used as I was to the BBC and to my regular producer, Innes Lloyd, I found LWT entirely well-meaning but awkward to work with only because it wasn’t an organisation geared to producing drama. ...”

“... about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels ...”

“... On 19 July​ 2015, a sullen, hot day with white skies, an unarmed black man was killed in Cincinnati. The incident began when Officer Ray Tensing, a member of the University of Cincinnati campus police, pulled over Samuel DuBose, whose car was missing its front licence plate. Tensing was wearing a body camera, and when the Hamilton County district attorney released the video ten days later, on 29 July, Americans watching the news that night saw about two minutes of what happened ...”

“... texts of Christian scripture and the writings of the 19th-century Adventist prophet, Ellen White, were of central importance. The connection between the Branch Davidians and the Seventh-Day Adventists has not been grasped by the media and has been downplayed by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church – a cautious, bureaucratic and wholly unthreatening ...”

“... beauty of the islands is expanding round us now, like a huge flower. Each traigh (‘beach’) is white-gold. The mid-sea blue and shore-sea green are glowing ultramarine in mid-channel, between here and Eriskay, and eau-de-Nil above the sandbars. The slopes of the pastures are an unbroken yellow fabric of primrose. Corncrakes grate among the clumps of flag ...”

“... and disdainful Ganguly, particularly loathsome, whereas one gets the feeling that they reckon Michael Vaughan to be a thoroughly decent bloke – more or less one of their own. Cricket has undoubtedly gained hugely from the friendly rivalry of this Ashes series, particularly by way of comparison with other sports, above all football, which seems a ...”

“... and confinement by teaching himself chess from a book of famous games, playing both Black and White; he exhausts the games in the book and plays himself in his head, his Black self improving to solve the ever harder problems his White self sets; eventually, divided, he goes mad. Reassuringly, this isn’t how chess is ...”

“... knows, the relief of that, the pub, the slope down into Newman Passage, the opening sequence of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a puddle of bloody neon, awkward stone setts, smokers in doorways; and then out, immediately, into another world, Newman Street. Black leather, chrome, complimentary coffee. Film, television, advertising. Bikers with ...”

“... ranges of survey data seeking the precise source of his magnetic attraction for the aggrieved white lower-middle and working classes. It will outlast the pundits holding forth on TV, collecting lecture fees and cranking out bestsellers that retail inside dope gleaned, single-sourced and second-hand, from somewhere near the elevators of Trump Tower. It ...”

“... relations between the two communities for years. Tensions continued, usually as a result of white encroachments on aboriginal hunting grounds, culminating in a full-scale Black War in the late 1820s – Tasmanians against colonial troops and armed settlers. That wasn’t the only massacre. Some of the European combatants were vicious, and clearly meant ...”

“... Selected Letters (1990) and a collection of prose, daybooks and papers (2007). In the interim Michael Davidson’s New Collected Poems (2002) had brought together about thirty published poems that were never collected, and a selection of about sixty unpublished poems, four of which date from the 1930s. Everything useful, it seemed, had been found and ...”

“... will culminate in an expertly targeted head-butt. Her mother’s swashbuckling new lover, Connor (Michael Fassbender), seems like a good thing, with his easy charm and his largesse; until, aroused by Mia’s pugnacity, he starts to groom her for sex. Like Katie in Red Road, she exacts a revenge as cunning as it is ferocious. But for her there will be no ...”

“... Anglicists if they knew what the English flag looked like. Yes, they replied, it’s that red, white and blue one with crosses going different ways. At least they were pleased to discover that the English flag is the exact reverse of the Danish one, for, as Saxo Grammaticus wrote long since, history in the North began with two brothers, whose names were ...”