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“... as they are, can’t help not coming up to. The second or critical section is extremely strong: John Gross on the Oxford Book, George Hartley on the early publishing, Clive James on the jazz criticism as well as the poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and others. But ...”

“... that will take care of everything we do, including not only detecting explosives but athlete’s foot as well.’ Every cracker-barrel sage and soapbox booster turned up for the party. One of them was Paul Ekman. He’s a psychologist, professor emeritus at the University of California and founder of the Emotional Intelligence Academy. In 2009, Time magazine ...”

“... and most of the characters wear fedoras, as if they’ve wandered in from a William Wyler or John Huston film. The sets, too, ‘bear witness to my passion for the American cinema’, Melville said. The phone booth in the métro is an American one; the bar resembles a coffee shop in Manhattan; the police interrogation room, with its Venetian blinds, is ...”

“... their equivalent in the 2005 reissue of Our Island Story by the right-wing think-tank Civitas. John Clare, the education editor of the Daily Telegraph, appealed to his readers for donations to support this project. ‘They responded by sending in an astonishing £25,000.’ There were messages of endorsement from Lady Antonia Fraser and the feisty ...”

“... be grim. Cape Grim, aptly named in 1798 by its British discoverer, Matthew Flinders RN, is a 3o0-foot sandstone spike projecting into the Southern Ocean on the wind-whipped western coast of Tasmania. Here nine weather scientists reporting to the IPCC work shifts in a huddle of prefabs, rotating in from Smithton, the nearest small settlement, sixty miles away ...”

“... store. On midsummer’s night in 1955 a tall, broad-shouldered farmer 17 years her senior, John Warren, took her to the stock car racing, and a year later, when Wendy was 21, they got married. John Warren rented 175 acres from the local squire in Dunton Bassett, a village in the south-west of the county. He’d been ...”

“... as criminal defendants Mr Crossman’s literary executors – among them his widow and Mr Michael Foot – and the editor of the Sunday Times. An order restraining publication could be issued with so much less inconvenience: by a judge alone, without a jury, and without the machinery of the criminal law. The Lord Chief Justice decided not to stop publication ...”

“... Mr Gradgrind: but the novel is best armed to do battle with him, in that it appears to have one foot in his camp because of the mass of particulars, resembling his ‘Facts’, that it mobilises for its own purposes. But it is a strange conflict, with long truces, and often looks like a mere family quarrel. I mean that the novelist’s effort – any ...”

“... pinned above my desk (I’ve never had a pinboard). I did, for a long time, have an index card a foot or two from where I write, bearing this consoling line from Ford Madox Ford: ‘It is an easy job to say that an elephant, however good, is not a good warthog; for most criticism comes to that.’PublishersFlaubert had a lordly view of the writer-publisher ...”

“... ended by it. Meanwhile, George W. Bush’s first-term attorney general, the sanctimonious John Ashcroft, saw the whole affair as an opportunity to get professional sport in the United States to confront the moral turpitude at its heart. He even persuaded Bush to include a few lines about drugs in sport in his 2004 State of the Union address, in which ...”

“... but once committed to the idea, he was a loyal and stubborn ally. Ashworth introduced Goossens to John Joseph Cahill, who was soon to become Labour Premier of New South Wales. A backroom politician of Irish immigrant stock who dreamed of bringing art to the people, Cahill gave an Australian down-to-earthness to the high-toned support for the scheme, and many ...”

“... the strength to flee, got as far as a stretch of open ground bounded by the rim of a thousand-foot precipice, and sat down –‘couched,’ Robin says, ‘like some heraldic beast’. It could escape only by charging the cordon of hunters and beaters. Before that could happen my great-uncle delivered the coup de grâce, at close range. It happened to be ...”

“... stepped out of a furnace’ and in terrible agony from the burns that cover its body from head to foot. This enigmatic creature moves towards the desk and places its paw on the sheets on which Hughes is forlornly attempting to concoct an essay, leaving a bloody print behind, and says: ‘Stop this – you are destroying us.’ Hughes wakes up a sadder and a ...”

“... screams said to have been heard down the street. I still have the bed, the polish at the foot of it scraped and scratched by my mother’s feet during the initial stages of that reluctant arrival. Had mine been a difficult birth, the persistence with which untoward events occur on and around my birthday would, though I am no believer in ...”

“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”