“... In the Irish section, for instance, his cheerful, affectionate sparring with Pete the Postman may seem more real, more fully imagined within the terms of naturalistic fiction, but there’s also the sense that it is merely a gloss on the surface of deeper currents of feeling. This is brought home by an affecting moment when Pete is driving the miserable ...”

“... for a referendum. Indeed, the explanation for the pollsters’ overestimate of the PQ vote may well lie in the Party’s soft support among Francophones, who go with the crowd in their general rhetoric, but are not prepared for the implications of separation. Moreover, it all depends on what question is asked. Support for ...”

“... far from dead. Attributing Wilkes’s success to a mixture of the spontaneous and the artificial may go some way to explaining why it was that many contemporaries, while suffering all the real inconveniences of his cheeky initiatives, could not in the end take the man seriously. Burke wrote to him and negotiated with him, but concluded only that he was ...”

“... that of the Tories who immediately preceded him in office. If this is true, which is doubtful, it may be simply that he has had more time to accumulate form. The three men whom he followed – Kenneth Clarke, Kenneth Baker and David Waddington – together occupied the post for just a few months more than he has already served. Baker’s brief romp managed to ...”

“... accompanied by auditory hallucinations and delusions of persecution’. In his entry for ‘May 1969’, Gascoyne snatches at themes that might become fully-developed poems; that might – through some form of transference – become part of Vale Royal. 1. A voice from childhood. Buttercups. Butterflies. Gold: the Psyche. Royalty incognito and ...”

“... acted odiously. No doubt the joke that d’Eon was madly in love with him was one that d’Eon may have played up to at first, but Beaumarchais was malicious enough to report it to the Government as literal fact. When d’Eon discovered, to his fury, that Beaumarchais’s real interest in the question of his gender was to win a fortune by insider ...”

“... McDonald’s, procuring the actors and scripting the event. Looking for big and easy payoffs, he may recruit pregnant women as passengers in the cow car, or target cars driven by men who have just picked up prostitutes, to embarrass them into admitting fault immediately. The Ramblin’ Man, a former cop who staged more than 150 crashes in ...”

“... with the trinkleting of Morris dancers; protesters at Fairmile had a pagan ‘Beltane’ bash at May Eve, a ripsnorter of a festival, with fire breathers, fire jugglers, the firing of an earth maze and puckish figures dancing – naked to be sure – around a bonfire to panpipes and drums. One grubby dancer, the thick end of a year’s dirt on him, dances ...”

“... some correlations of cause and effect. Edward Jenner (as well as developing the cow-pox vaccine) may have been the first to identify calcification of valves and arteries with angina. He was probably deterred from making this known by fear for his revered teacher, John Hunter, who was already suffering from the condition and was shortly to die of it. The ...”

“... Horizontal Iwasawa Theory and the Shimura-Taniyama conjecture and, excluded from such arcana, may be left wondering about the whole business of proving theorems, and about the mysteriously powerful attraction these problems have. Surely, something more than symbolic game-playing is involved. Certainly, mathematicians see themselves as frying much grander ...”

“... through the vents in his writing room. Getting on to midnight. Feels a little better; new writing may be at hand. Assumes that Islas Malvinas is Spanish. Assumes that these islands were called Malvinas originally, before they became known as the Falklands. But the encyclopedias correct him: it seems that the British, like God, were originally everywhere, and ...”

“... we want that too. In his most effective verses, though, Nature is mostly seen as hostile. It may be good for us but it wants nothing from us in return, beyond our trembling capitulation. Caught in Nature’s war-zones, even the most elemental humans – even the poet Hughes himself – come across as wimpishly inept, riddled with feebleness and ...”

“... because they always agree, especially in disagreeing with almost everything their children may do or want to do. They are ‘enemies of abandon’, and regard even the convent school to which they reluctantly send their daughters as a sink of modernity. Uma adores school, though she is a dismal failure there, being plain, shortsighted, clumsy, and not ...”

“... acceptable. I owe this information, let me say, not to any of my law books but to E.S. Turner’s May It Please Your Lordship, a repository of those bits of legal history which remind me of what Jack Hendy, a law lecturer who started life as a jobbing electrician, once said he had found in both trades: that the most useful thing you could have with you was a ...”

“... gun. Cluke tires of Bob’s long-winded accounts of his experiences (a view with which the reader may sympathise) and tells him to hurry up. Meanwhile, Bob decides that he wants to see the inside of a hog farm, and tries to break into one. He is arrested. Cluke summons him back to Denver and presents him with an ultimatum: either he acquires two properties by ...”