“... his villain a Labour intellectual who becomes a life peer and bears the transparent soubriquet of Lord Frost. And yet the modern intelligence services owed at one time a considerable debt to the writers of spy stories – in particular to William Le Queux and Phillips Oppenheim. Le Queux’s hero, Duckworth Drew, whose name rhymed with his own and whose ...”

“... of him is adversarial and de haut en bus. But this does not seem to imply wholesale dismissal. The home-truths Thersites delivers about Agamemnon, for example, are similar to, and sometimes taken as a parody of, those which Achilles delivers in Book One, so that the discredit attaching to them may have less to do with their substance, or at least with any ...”

“... It was drizzling just a bit; we were returning by the gully where the black foliage decayed. 23 Home. Its pediments adorned by coats of arms, the massive hall, green glimpses of internal courts. Silence reigned there. There, in the sombre dining hall (described above) dwelt a staff of wizened waiters. A sharp-eyed porter watched the gates. There existed for ...”

“... he found the lifeless remains of his colleague trussed up inside. Brough was delighted. Back home, he inspected every inch of the body and checked it for marks and scratches. He propped it on his knee, smoothed its hair, and gradually settled back into his customary routines. At first he had been rattled, but things could not have worked out better: the ...”

“... Urban Space’, he pits ‘Latino carnivality’ against Anglo anality at every level, including home decor. ‘The glorious sorbet palette of Mexican and Caribbean house paint . . . is perceived as sheer visual terrorism by non-Hispanic homeowners who believe that their equity directly depends upon a neighbourhood colour order of subdued pastels and white ...”

“... reveals that the 10.15 to Leeds has been cancelled (‘operational difficulties’), so we go back home for a cup of tea and come down for the 11.20, with its cheerful conductor who phones Lost Property at Doncaster just to check that it is open even though it’s New Year’s Day. We’re quite cheerful too, having spent a glum couple of days grieving over ...”

“... time equipped with mousy wife and brand-new video camera (the showing of the subsequent holiday home-movie at an end-of-tour reception is, however, the novel’s comic highlight) – and there is the middle-aged couple from Croydon. One day a PhD student utterly at a loss for a thesis topic will light on ‘The Usage of Croydon as a Motif in English ...”

“... for economical exposition in any format and many of the direct quotations from interviews sink home with the incisiveness of sound-bites. Some of this may be little more than off-the-record background bitching, but a number of splendidly tactless remarks are explicitly attributed. There is a particularly revealing section on the social frisson provoked by ...”

“... an oddly memorable poem as ‘The Loss of the Eurydice’ (‘The Eurydice, it concerned thee O Lord’). The trouble is that this colloquialism can collide head-on with decorative ‘decadence’, producing some of Hopkins’s worst efforts, like ‘Harry Ploughman’ or the ‘Echo’ poem. Charles Lock, who wrote a thoughtful study of Hopkins as a ...”

“... fantasy acquired years ago, thereby initiating a popular taste for such works: Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. John Sutherland also noted that Knowledge of Angels commits the sin any fabulist should avoid, and that Tolkien certainly sidestepped: displaying a meaning that is too determinate and obvious. It could be said, on the other hand, that Walsh ...”

“... release, a place to express feelings of frustration or despair. The bizarre, explosive diary of Lord Reith – which he conceived of as a sober historical record – was, in practice, a depository for the bad feelings he had towards everybody who stood in his way. However happy they may be in their private lives, it is unusual for politicians not to feel ...”

“... by the East, although he travels further (geographically, at least) than Murray’s characters. Lord William Arthur Valerian Pommeroy is the hippy aristocrat who, in Nobuko Albery’s Absurd Courage, becomes so fascinated by Oriental thought that he founds a kind of guerrilla priesthood, the World Elsewhere. For him, emulation becomes ...”

“... perhaps in the acknowledged influence on him, at Glasgow University, of the lectures of the future Lord Kelvin, with their insistence, as Frazer put it, on ‘a conception of the physical universe as regulated by exact and absolutely unvarying laws of nature’. After Glasgow Frazer went on to Trinity, acquiring honours at each stage, and then read for the ...”

“... For a short time she had fantasised that I would many M., a young man who would inherit a stately home. My grandmother dubbed him ‘the Duke’, no doubt hoping that the flippant nickname would disguise the fervour of her hopes for me. When she realised I wasn’t interested, she joked that it would be better if I married a sweep. Sweeps would always be in ...”

“... his father absent for long periods of time (eluding arrest for past crimes, making money to send home, or selling bogus oil-rights to suckers), Jim dropped out of high school to support his family as a bellboy at the Hotel Texas, and quickly learnt how to supply his guests with more than just the keys to their rooms. According to Thompson’s latest ...”