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“... four parallel texts on the page (edited from the lucubrations of the great and good Sir Thomas Urquhart, a fellow Scottish patriot and eccentric genius), prints the vowels and consonants of a passage on separate pages, and interrupts the text with blank sections (where the manuscript was supposedly nibbled by mice). Not all of Gray’s literary ...”

“... favourite source is the contemporary novel. Again and again he mines Arnold Bennett, Edward Thomas, E.M. Forster, Wells and Galsworthy for material, and takes their social criticism at face value.Is it wise to rely so heavily on these novelists’ arguments in constructing a moral critique? In every era writers can be found condemning the ...”

“... a self-inflicted lèse-majesté. In another age, the Tower of London would be dusting down Thomas More’s old cell for him. But it would be unfair to dismiss Batten as a know-nothing stirrer, though often his behaviour does seem to fit that description: calling Islam‘a death cult’, claiming that the EU was inspired by Hitler’s plans for Europe ...”

“... was pulled. Shipments of cocaine, votes and souls have also often been listed. In 2001, the artist Keith Obadike put his blackness up for sale (the description is reproduced in Everyday eBay): ‘This heirloom has been in the possession of the seller for 28 years.’ Unpackaged cornflakes aren’t the only things eBay won’t let you sell. Other banned ...”

“... when he arrived in London from Everton, Lancashire in 1753. He came to be apprenticed to George Keith, a bookseller in Gracechurch Street in the City. This was Hogarth’s London, a scene of dirty streets and dark alleys in which impressionable young people were met off the coach by an expectant crowd of brothel keepers, cutpurses and card sharps. The ...”

“... presumably to discourage Stallworthy from submitting himself further to Kipling, Housman, Dylan Thomas, Sidney Keyes and Keith Douglas. I find it strange that Tosswill sent him to Yeats and, in another letter, to Hopkins and Melville, writers to whom he was likely in any event to become addicted. No talk of much ...”

“... My memory is that she was wearing a greyish white T-shirt adorned with a Nosferatu-like image of Keith Richards. Before the assembled hacks, she launched into a risible stream-of-consciousness rap – a dithyramb to all the Keefs and Bobs and other venerable rock’n’roll patriarchs. I wanted a polysex pop music Kali, and here she was dragging it all back ...”

“... The planners? The bureaucrats? The Arabs? The Blacks? And who was to be the saviour? Enoch Powell? Keith Joseph? The Maharishi? Tony Benn? One man’s saviour, of course, is another man’s scapegoat; and the European Community, with its rhetoric of ‘growth’ and ‘progress’, filled the double bill. Associating it with faceless international airport ...”

“... neatly sceptical essay effectively pulls the plug on the first article in the book – in which Thomas van Nortwick offers a touching, but nugatory, reading of the character of Odysseus against his own background as the son of an alcoholic mother. (‘If you cannot keep your parent from drinking, at least you can try to keep yourself safe ... In short, you ...”

“... environment than ours. Peter was, I think, a political scientist; there were early editions of Thomas Hobbes on the shelves. Ilse typed up John Beaglehole’s edition of Cook’s journals. Only occasionally did my father seem to feel that the refugees might have been a little impatient with provincial life in the South Pacific. My friend Graham Percy (who ...”

“... been plenty for evangelicals to complain about even since the triumphs of Bush and Karl Rove. As Thomas Frank argued in 2004 in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the striking thing about the Republican alliance with evangelicals has been the thinness of their legislative achievements: abortion is still legal, campaigners for gay rights have made ...”

“... which a Jewish refugee tells his life-story at a length suggestive of an unpublished novel by Thomas Mann (Amos,however, spares us its contents). All that and – surely this is the next-to-last straw – he has time to reread bits of his manuscript. But given the racy and pithy exuberance of Williams’s narrative and his crowded comic invention, maybe ...”

“... mistake to broach too obviously the ethics of personal responsibility. Had not her ally and mentor Keith Joseph seen his own leadership aspirations shrivel in the aftermath of his notorious Edgbaston speech? When Joseph addressed the Edgbaston Conservative Association at Birmingham’s Grand Hotel on 19 October 1974, the Conservatives, under Ted Heath, had ...”

“... Fire’, ‘The Trolls’ – belong to the poetic history of that time as much as those of Keith Douglas or Sidney Keyes. He had, you might say, a Good War. But after the war, in the early Fifties, something went wrong. He tried long poems in two volumes – Ten Burnt Offerings and Autumn Sequel – but the wit and vigour of Autumn Journal was ...”

“... up onto the rougher, more English ground of Povington Hill. The heath still resembles the one Thomas Hardy imagined as Lear’s, but it is now part of the Royal Armoured Corps’s gunnery range: enclosed and blasted in a new sense. The road goes up past the turf-covered rings of Flower’s Barrow, and then turns off towards Worbarrow Bay. Along with the ...”