“... to make that coarse woollen coat. To begin with, you needed to know a shearling from a gimmer lamb, or hire someone who did. In 1611 Henry Bankes employed two shepherds, Durington and Blackwell, to value some lambs in Yorkshire; it turned out he was overpaying by sixpence a head. Then you had to set your sheep in a pasture, and send someone, perhaps a ...”

“... it everywhere, and to everything, the image of little-Gerard-as-Christ, and the holy slap of the Lamb. Kerouac’s best biographer, Gerard Nicosia, describes pretty well the nature of the attachment: on Sunday afternoons Gerard ‘would lead Jean by the hand around the Stations of the Cross outside the Franco-American orphanage on Pawtucket ...”

“... against the yellow – Japan for instance’. He believed, as he told his secretary of state, Robert Lansing, that ‘“white civilisation” and its domination over the world rested largely on our ability to keep this country intact.’ Though apparently all-encompassing, his rhetoric about self-determination was aimed at the European peoples ...”

“... Anthony. In the same year Sarah’s elder sister Martha married a well-to-do young solicitor, Robert Roscoe, who had been one of their first lodgers at Southampton Buildings. This was an excellent match from the Walkers’ point of view, one they were no doubt keen to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah ...”

“... setting of Keats’s sonnet ‘To Sleep’ with, say, John Tavener’s setting of Blake’s ‘The Lamb’, to appreciate this. Tavener’s setting is original, attractively naive, touching, but it leaves one with the feeling that it is just one of many ways in which music could be fitted to these particular words, even that there are other possible words for ...”

“... for their continued authority of speech we must come closer to our own time – to the poetry of Robert Lowell or of Sylvia Plath. There the language of poetry has the same kind of mesmeric power and the same air of constant danger. But it is, of course, danger of a different kind – the danger that boils up from within and makes living for a poet a hazard ...”

“... and wrote good verse, wrote some good Christian verse. And in fact his elegy ‘On the death of Mr Robert Levet’ (which is included neither in Davie’s anthology nor in Cecil’s) seems to me a very good Christian poem, not merely because it emerges from a culture professedly Christian, but because – on Davie’s own grounds – it illustrates the parable ...”

“... they are only slightly more so than my aunties’ insistence that we are descended from Sir Robert Peel, or my own thought, once voiced at Gilpin Place and briskly squashed by Dad, that Uncle Clarence, my mother’s brother killed in the First War, might be the Unknown Soldier.I still have much of Aunt Eveline’s music, albums covered in brown ...”

“... His older twin, Jesse Garon, was stillborn. (There was ugly gossip later that the doctor, William Robert Hunt, might have had a drink; that he might have saved Jesse if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the surprise appearance of a second child. But the Presleys were satisfied with his work and Dr Hunt received his standard $15 payment from the county.) In ...”

“... up to the New Abbey. In its surrounds were a tumulus where the ancient Scots kings, including Robert the Bruce, had had their bones interred. And Macbeth himself? Around those grounds were numerous Celtic crosses, planted like miniature saplings, most of them only replicas of destroyed originals. The shape of the Celtic cross was remarkably endearing to ...”

“... officers, certainly more experienced big-ship sailors than he was, he set forth to save his lost lamb. The consternation of these seamen was increased when he insisted on doing what they wouldn’t have permitted even in far less desperate weather. Incredulous and terrified, we steamed out through the shattered boom and took on the storm with the after hatch ...”

“... the Sun in 1969, after he’d bought the News of the World from the Carr organisation, defeating Robert Maxwell en route. The News of the World is a Sunday paper, so it was a point of elementary commercial logic to start a daily paper to accompany it, in order that the presses would not lie idle during the week. Larry ...”

“... poems makes a reader feel that he can only approve the poet’s judgment in not collecting them; Robert Conquest plunges the reader into an obscure background involving reciprocal limericks which were no doubt funny at the time but which are not (unlike those Monteith quotes) funny enough now. In the absence of any more exact sense of subject and form, these ...”

“... the uncertain Irishness of certain writers. Was Sterne Irish? Was Oliver Goldsmith Irish? Was Robert Tressell Irish? Is Iris Murdoch Irish? But the argument about who was gay and who was not and how we know is more difficult. How can someone be gay if, as in the case of Gogol, there is no direct evidence? Yet if you trawl through Gogol’s stories with ...”

“... is), besides various ceremonial cleavers including the one used to cut up the first New Zealand lamb brought to England and served to Queen Victoria in 1880. Nicest though are two Victorian or Edwardian toy butchers’ shops. They’re bigger and grander than the one Dad made for Gordon and me c.1940 but whereas these joints are nailed into place, Dad’s ...”