“... delight.Of Maconachie, Paxton, Tickler, and Gloucester’s Stephens;Fray Bentos, Spiller and Baker, odds and evensOf trench foodKate Kennedy thinks he was equally talented in words and music: ‘The only other models,’ she writes in this new biography, ‘are Renaissance figures such as John Dowland and Thomas Campion.’ (She might have looked ...”

“... a face ‘sun-baked to the hue of coffee’ – and stalwart Dr (of course) Petrie, who, like his Baker Street predecessor, tells the story and gets the girl. Nayland Smith and Petrie exist in a state of wildly malfunctioning cliché: ‘His eyes were literally on fire,’ Petrie solemnly reports of one of Smith’s more agitated moments. Rohmer didn’t ...”

“... accepted it for publication but obligingly found him a day job as an assistant editor at British Baker, another Maclaren’s magazine.Ballard’s first published stories, ‘Prima Belladonna’ (set in a futuristic holiday resort and narrated by the owner of a shop selling musical plants) and ‘Escapement’ (about a man forced to relive, over and over, the ...”

“... places, in each other’s presence. That is the impression one gets from such excellent poems as Michael Longley’s ‘The Linen Workers’ and Derek Mahon’s ‘A Refusal to Mourn’. In 1962, in The New Poetry, there were poems of similar kind and distinction, such as ‘A Peasant’, by R.S. Thomas, and Iain Crichton-Smith’s ‘Old Woman’. All four ...”

“... culture, they’ve also carved out a general readership for themselves – witness Nicholson Baker on card catalogues – and joined forces with groups slighted by literary theorists: librarians, book dealers, local historians. Even the form of The Book History Reader privileges empirical case studies over theoretical generalisation, omitting the John ...”

“... is sacked while flying back from Washington DC. David Bowie dies. We have to care about Steve Baker and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s next moves. Teenagers riot and loot in London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. Theresa May invites Jeremy Corbyn to Downing Street to do a deal. ‘Take back control.’ Strivers v. shirkers. The Red Wall. Eat Out to Help ...”

“... His determination to see nature as benign has been called a flaw by his most intelligent critic, Michael Cohen, in The Pathless Way. As we climbed together on a route called Great White Book in the Tuolumne domes east of Yosemite, he told me how Muir was disconcerted by the writhen and stunted junipers rooting in crevices of the granite because they were ...”

“... Milton Keynes is a direct descendant of Bloomsbury seems about as plausible as trying to show that Michael Foot speaks with the authentic voice of the Levellers. More fundamentally, the central argument of this book, that London’s homely architecture is the product and expression of Londoners’ homely virtues, is chronologically unsound. Most of the ...”

“... had no dearth of talented, strong-willed women activists, including the grassroots organiser Ella Baker and Jo Ann Robinson, a Montgomery college professor and a key organiser of the bus boycott. But its top echelons were almost entirely male. Every speaker at the 1963 March on Washington was a man. In 1957, Black ministers formed the Southern Christian ...”

“... and Palestinian groups. His neoconservative comrade at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Ledeen, was more explicit in conversation with Turner: ‘Iraq is not what it’s all about. We have been at war for twenty years with a terror network supported by Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia . . . Now, like it or not, we’re in a regional ...”

“... Le Pen to the Tory Conference. The clients include other Conservative ideologues such as Michael Portillo and Peter Lilley and a strange breed of suburban Brylcreem boys – John Moore, Kenneth Baker, Jeffrey Archer and, pre-eminently, Cecil Parkinson. What they have in common is a dreadful smarminess, a smoothly ...”

“... dying horses and abandoned children. In The Element of Crime (1984), a ravaged cop called Fisher (Michael Elphick) struggles through a flooded landscape, trying to solve a crime. Fisher is a particularly bad detective: he has an affair with a prostitute who turns out to have been the lover of the murderer he is trying to find, then he accidentally murders the ...”

“... side. ‘A shadow would come over the ship as soon as you heard you were coaling,’ said George Michael Clarkson (Joiner First Class). The great enemy was dust. All doors would be sealed; small holes were filled with oakum; lifeboats were hoisted outboard; officers and men alike wore their oldest clothes and poked Vaseline up their nostrils and spread it ...”

“... live among them, had the definite ring of an oxymoron. The vitality of Ackroyd (as of his friend Michael Moorcock) is on a 19th-century scale. He has made respectable the concept of the man of letters. And, much more than that, he has made it pay. Ackroyd also customised his own biography. We know what we are allowed to know and what we can learn, by ...”

“... write to. In the winter of 1841-2, he writes to the children of his sister Nicoline Kristine: to Michael (three times), to Carl (three times) and to Sofie (once or twice); and to the children of his sister Petrea Severine: three times to Henriette, whom he addresses as Jette, and even, once, to Vilhelm. And what were the ages of these young ...”