“... is a God, the God of the Jews, of Moses and Elias, But this is not the time to speak of him. Peter McDonald has the misfortune of being introduced as one of the most promising of the younger generation of Northern Irish poets. It is of course another accident of priority that the work of any young Northern Irish poet now writing is going to invite ...”

“... that side of the Atlantic, without ever managing to communicate his whereabouts to anyone at home. Peter Ackroyd’s Milton in America (1996) seems curiously, if perhaps unconsciously, parasitic on this earlier extravaganza. Milton, however, despite some fleeting fictional attention from Robert Graves, has never been able to vie with the Romantics in this ...”

“... appropriately) a ‘Wanted’ poster. In April 1939, Auden, Isherwood and MacNeice gave a reading at the Keynote Club in Manhattan. Kallman and another Brooklyn student, Walter James Miller, were in the audience, with Kallman sitting in the front row giving the two international pederasts the glad eye. Afterwards he and Miller went backstage. Miller ...”

“... sage Harold Wilson and all those too feckless to see the connection between muck and brass. Reading his reprinted stuff, which was mostly written out of a sort of turgid, inarticulate resentment rather than with real rage or outrage, one recalls the blustering world of George Brown, Ray Gunter and Robert Mellish – those Labour dinosaurs who used to ...”

“... others, Eric Griffiths. In an essay included in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (1985, edited by Peter Robinson), Griffiths expressed reservations about Hill’s ‘unsteady reliance on religious metaphors’ in his critical writings. In Hill’s essay ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement” ’ in particular, the idea that poetic language may escape ...”

“... of course been exploited by writers in all genres, but seldom with much credibility; the picture Peter Carey gives of them in Oscar and Lucinda, for example, is what might politely be called a travesty. Edmund Gosse is the nearest to an exception. In Father and Son he does not tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, for though the book was not ...”

“... manufactured a French infiltrator called Spy Nozy. How, then, should a Life of Blake be written? Peter Ackroyd is having a go at one, and I suspect that what attracts him is Blake’s London, for which King has very little feeling. The poetry is crowded with London voices and London places. I remember my delight as a student when a supervisor remarked that ...”

“... as well as entertaining to manage it in one of the ways Pritchett can do. I have been reading Dostoevsky again: The Possessed. You know the sensation. You are sitting by the fire reflecting that one of the things that reconciles you to life, even at its most tragic, is the low clear daily monotone of its voice. Suddenly comes a knock at the ...”

“... Cinderella, Bo Peep and Berie sneak off for a smoke in the alley between Hickory Dickory Dock and Peter Pumpkin Eater’s Pumpkin. Neither children nor adults, they are about to learn that story-land is a sad and gory land, and they deride the credulity of children who think otherwise. To the little girl who keeps stroking her glitter and asking for the ...”

“... rich fund of popular culture. Now, at last, someone has done the job. It makes highly entertaining reading. Alas, it is also deeply depressing for anyone who (like me) had high hopes of the Wilson Government at the time. Needless to say, not all the Brown saga is included in Mr Paterson’s recital – that would require thousands of pages. But many of the ...”

“... At the Dublin meeting with Albert Reynolds and John Hume, Adams put his name to a statement reading: ‘We are at the beginning of a new era in which we are all totally and absolutely committed to democratic and peaceful methods of resolving our political problems.’ Afterwards, John Hume was still being pressed about the ‘permanent’ issue by ...”

“... a singular lack of curiosity. And while the judges annually complain about the great burden of reading placed upon them, it must be the case that most of the hundred or so novels submitted can be discarded pretty quickly. I was going to say after twenty pages, until I remembered the case of a Booker judge a few years ago who was doing some early winnowing ...”

“... Let me defer here to Adolph Reed, who is emerging as one of the few black American essayists worth reading in a period of intensifying racism and of stultifying parochial loyalties, and who never lets the pressure of the first move him an inch nearer to the second: Early in the saga, there was considerable evidence of multiracial fan support for O.J., as ...”

“... obligatory references to dark, peripheral events like the Partitions of Poland or the reforms of Peter the Great – now fa1l into oblivion, not because they are incomplete but because they are distortions. Neither is this a matter of crude ‘equating’: of setting out to prove that the Counter-Reformation in Central Europe was as important as it was in ...”

“... off debts, he sold out to Mark McCormack of the International Management Group, recently hired by Peter Mandelson to raise funds for Britain’s millennium celebrations. IMG runs the finances and Bollettieri runs everything else. Bollettieri emerges from the memoir as an endearing hustler, vain (about his waistline, his teeth, his muscles, his tan) but ...”