“... Had I been less prepared, I would have leftin springtime, when the plum tree in the yardwas still in bloom,the windows open after months of snow,one magpie in the roadand then another.I could have slipped away, late afternoon,while everyone was busy somewhere else,the fish van at the corner, childrendawdling home from schoolin twos and threes, a porch lightlit against the dusk on Tollbooth Wynd ...”

“... but to have a ‘friend’ – no, it really won’t do. ‘I’m your friend,’ said Myfanwy to John as they crouched in the ‘dark and furry cupboard while the rest played hide-and-seek’. Betjeman got that about right.‘We’ve always been the greatest friends’ – that is the kind of thing the lady says about her dentist or accountant, or a woman ...”

“... up – is sharpened by a pervasive and probably accurate suspicion that the fine Italian hand of John Hume can be seen in the Irish Government glove. Indeed, one of the novelties of the whole affair has been the contrast between the Dublin Government’s patent desire to have the SDLP on its side (to the extent that even the hawkish Seamus Mallon has come ...”

“... The best moment of the 2004 US presidential election was the moment when John Kerry had won it. It was on the day itself, in the late evening, GMT. The first poll results data were coming through on the blogs: unedited poll data of the type which one now knows needs extensive interpretation, but never mind. Kerry was doing fabulously ...”

“... The slightest words define the most. Am, for instance, filling up a life, Expressing, if expression is compelled, The body’s territorial extent; Assertion’s power to concentrate A colony of egos in Their dusty settlements of skin. Denials, deprecations, steppings down, Apologies like mornings, wry with mist, Assumptions of uniqueness, leaky dawns, Fluorescent, repetitious afternoons, And fragile nights with sprays of stars, Each chip and bit, each lucid smithereen, A glimpse inside what might have been, A looking-glass of overripe And tinily declarative Boltholes Speckled with defections and Disfigured with this spreading black That takes each thinning drift of breath And will not give it back ...”

“... This man, this other Whom brilliance of sunlight almost drowns – He is a dark blur Out on the beach inspecting stones. So does he come Foolish like this each day to stare Drawn to an edge where there is no more edge? Something there is wears out As if a single look of mine might drown That figure draped in sunlight Till given a slight lilt It disappears and goes inside And I had wanted it so much, That journey here past light-infected brickwork The train a prolonged dawdle Towards an absence nursed by rails, and now This congregation of small stones To say that, being here, you are Almost word-perfect now ...”

“... Only the minor gods have ventured outthis morning: delicateand silken, with a gift for mimicry,they do not stoop to punish, or forgive,though, sometimes, they are capableof blessing.I wake at dawn, but not to what I knowof Nineveh: a quinqueremein abstract, certain huesof cardamon, or tradescantia;a siege of herons; razorfish in shoals;cat snake and vipertracked across the flooror hidden in the feedat lambing time;till what I cannot recogniseas Silk Roador an ounce of vie en rose,is weaselled out of logic by a graceas final as that fault line in the mindwhere wildernesscomes slanting through the glintof self-deceit and guile to claim its own ...”

“... not so subconscious desires of their political masters and dressing the intelligence up. So should John Scarlett, the head of the JIC, take the rap? Not according to Butler: ‘We realise that our conclusions may provoke calls for the current chairman of the JIC, Mr Scarlett, to withdraw from his appointment as the next chief of SIS [MI6]. We greatly hope that ...”

“... the Messenger, a title rich in ‘poor me’ implications; this one is called The Wages of Spin (John Murray, 261pp., £18.99, March, 0 7195 6481 6), the implication of which is that Sir Bernard wants to impose a buffer zone between himself and those who now do the bullshitting job he once did: they being headed, it seems, not for a knighthood but for the ...”

“... action. ‘It is some feat to go to war five times in six years,’ are the opening words of John Kampfner’s Blair’s Wars (Free Press, £17.99). ‘That statistic impelled me to write this book.’ It’s good that Kampfner was impelled to write it because he has done an excellent job in going back, Blair war by Blair war, over the political history ...”

“... of warfare hope will animate the rank and file, they themselves do not necessarily share them. As John Keegan pungently demonstrates, warfare since tribal times has always been divided more or less unevenly between those who direct it, those who enjoy it (in different contexts and for different reasons) and those who suffer it. This last class would ...”

“... circumstances even impressive, the mere desire to have seems to many today – just as it did to John Locke – a furtive, even incipiently criminal form of lust. Disputes over property, and over the power which flows from it and flows back into it, are far from being the only major theme (let alone the motor) of human history. But for a number of millennia ...”

“... achievements as a general trade publisher rank him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is ...”

“... smacks of excess. But, compared with Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Jane Austen (1979) and John Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen (1984), the work under review is in so many ways the best that it deserves to make its mark. The three authors, moreover, approach their subject (or subjects) from quite different directions and differ greatly in their ...”

“... Always, I am coming home from hunting frogs or standing in the swim of wind beneath the last dyke and the sea;                   and, always, she is there, in lanternglow, a light that makes this world believable. My eyes turned from the snuff of paraffin and darkness in that house so long ago, I barely know it’s gone: the washrooms rinsed with frost, a skewed moon picking out the paths from here to there where someone, not myself, still wanders, till I lie down in the warm and wait for her to come, her hands a labyrinth of mint and carrion, her book the only one I have, its pages fingerstained with daisychain and lilac, and such depth in the pictures, I would find The Snow Queen, or the Lady of the Lake so readily, I thought they must be mine ...”