“... scripture to their compulsions with a magic literalism, as in the case of Margaret Joynt, a young woman who said she had the Star of Bethlehem in her eye. Then again, the hermeneutics of many churches were no less weird: Joynt belonged to the Catholic Apostolic Church, whose founders claimed to have the gift of speaking in tongues. It was the context ...”

“... Davie) to established talents in mid-career (Charles Tomlinson, Douglas Dunn) to new Best of Young British megastars (W.N. Herbert, Robert Crawford). But the fact relevant to Pound’s current standing is the one in Michael Alexander and James McGonigal’s Introduction: Sons of Ezra could not find a British ...”

“... in libraries, both private and public. The catalogue for Sensation, the show of works by young British artists from the Saatchi collection, currently on view at the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly, runs over two hundred pages, with more than a hundred colour plates, as well as a series of black and white portrait photographs of the artists taken ...”

“... 1760s, is often said to be a portrait of Barber. It shows a fine-featured, rather dreamy-looking young man in three-quarters profile, with a high forehead and finely curled black hair somewhat receding at the temples. If this is a portrait of him, it is in at least one respect an idealised image – the skin is smooth, with none of the markings of ...”

“... humour, neither of them from the narrator’s point of view. The image of the acrobats is from Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, and isn’t, on its first mention in that book, a dream: ‘The doors are twenty feet high, as if awaiting the day when a family of acrobats will walk from room to room, sideways, without dismantling from each other’s ...”

“... obliged to dress themselves in it, each one a different hero. Rab Hines, the working man with the young family, in The Busconductor Hines (1984); Tammas, the young gambler of A Chancer (1985); a schoolteacher, Patrick Doyle, in A Disaffection (1989); Sammy, the ex-convict blinded by the police, in the Booker Prize-winning ...”

“... inhabitants of Marlow, for example, who were treated to the recurrent spectacle of a disgraceful young radical poet returning distractedly to his cottage after long scrambles in the woods. ‘He was the most interesting figure I ever saw,’ a child witness recalled later in life, still much struck. ‘His steps were often hurried, and sometimes he was ...”

“... recollections of the happy times of Elgar and Vaughan Williams encouraged proposals that after Sir Michael Tippett, the next candidate for composer-laureate and international standard-bearer should be Tavener. As soon as a young or not-so-young composer in the post-Górecki era has been ...”

“... obsessed with the cinema, and with American rock music in those favouring Sixties. They started young and went to film school, directing their first features at the end of that decade, each thus joining a rising group of film-makers: Scorsese associated with America’s ‘Movie-Brats’ (Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas), Wenders with the ‘New German ...”

“... of the Wyon family, a well-known family of London medal-makers, and one of its faces shows a young frock-coated pathologist seated on an elegant stool in a laboratory equipped with Fin de Siècle bacteriological equipment. In his hand he is holding a heart, which he is gazing at intently. As the scene is a London teaching hospital one can be quite ...”

“... his publisher, he fell ‘headlong into the gutter’, he was ‘constantly being humiliated’. Michael Bloch, who knew his subject well for many years, is a tactful, sensitive but not an indulgent biographer. His book conveys the contradictions of character and circumstance out of which this complicated, elusive but attractive personality evolved towards ...”

“... boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space ...”

“... in front of it or below it. In Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (1994), Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxendall have described the way this works with Tiepolo’s Four Continents – the ceiling of the staircase in the Würzburg Residenz – where ambiguities that defy geometrical analysis seem to exploit the changes in the architectural environment as ...”

“... the 7-1 outsider and the only first novel on the list – is narrated by Dolores Gauci, a young girl whose Maltese father gambled away his Cardiff café on the day she was born. Frank Gauci is a weak, compulsive man who ignores the difficulties of his family and hides behind the pages of the Sporting Life. Azzopardi has a keen sense of the shame of ...”

“... the frozen movements of people and things. Many potential points of origin are in the frame. Yes, Michael Schmidt’s eloquent and understated city scenes, Berlin nach 45, show the empty spaces left by the destruction of the city in the Second World War. But there is just as much that points to different origins: the erasure of war’s traces and wounds, for ...”