“... But no one doubts that, a pocket still to be mopped up behind borders that already extend to the Black Sea, they will enter it in due course. The great issue facing the Union lies further east, at the point where no vast steppe confounds the eye, but a long tradition has held that a narrow strip of water separates one world from another. No one has ever ...”

“... most of the women in his life.Whatever reservations Larkin had about his parents (‘days spent in black, twitching, boiling HATE!!!’), by Oxford and adulthood they had modulated, says Motion, into ‘controlled but bitter resentment’. This doesn’t stop Larkin sending poems to his father (‘I crave / The gift of your courage and indifference’) and ...”

“... on, but then skirts. The historical novel – if we except its one great precursor, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas – is a product of romantic nationalism. This is as true of Tolstoy as it is of Scott, Cooper, Manzoni, Galdós, Jókai, Sienkiewicz or so many others. The original matrix of this nationalism was the European reaction against Napoleonic ...”

“... the ‘Men in White’ – has given way to an ever more circumscribed stratum, a process which Michael Barr, the leading historian of modern Singapore, examines in rich detail. The well-oiled pistons of the market-state are increasingly accompanied by the creaks and squabbles of a Chinese dynasty. The country’s prized state companies are overrun by ...”

“... than the paratactic. In a later phase of the Modernist endeavour this would be recognised, so that Michael Edwards (Of Making Many Books, 1990) can say of Charles Tomlinson – in my view, quite rightly: ‘Tomlinson’s syntax is what makes his poems, linguistically, what they are ... in the poetry of our century, Tomlinson enacts the revenge of ...”

“... compressed three vertebrae but never lost consciousness. My English professor and mentor, the poet Michael Heffernan, was first down the stairs and out the door to where I had landed. I must have appeared somewhat dazed and breathless. ‘Did you hit your head?’ he kept asking once he had determined I was alive. ‘What day is it?’ ‘Who is the President ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... their left-wing views altogether chose not to return to the old militant methods. ‘For while the black-and-white, either-or approach to political art may have been artistically compelling, it proved ineffective and even dangerous with regard to politics itself.’ If the Left parties had been prepared to gloss over their differences they would have kept ...”

“... of the emperor’s new clothes. For the handful of liberals – Lord Scarman, Anthony Lester, Michael Zander – who have been arguing for decades that we need to have our rights and the government’s powers written down and invigilated by independent judges, the Nineties are looking like the moment of truth. That they were right about the fragility of ...”

“... leading paleontologists’. Mr Horner appears again on page 147. On page 190, having dismissed Michael Crichton as a practitioner of ‘standard alarmist environmentalism’, Gingrich muses: ‘Why not aspire to build a real Jurassic Park? (It may not be at all impossible, you know.)’ ‘My early professional dreams,’ he lets fall a few pages ...”

“... her parents warning that if she stayed out playing longer than she was allowed to, a man in a long black coat would come and put a ball in her mouth to choke her. The sexual anxiety behind this bogeyman is clear, but Moerloose comments that she and her friends thought that grown-ups made up such stories to frighten them into obedience. They experimented with ...”

“... to Tbilisi, cheerfully teasing the KGB and breaking the rules by changing currency on the black market, selling their old clothes – and in Reddaway’s case distributing a few Bibles. When in due course Reddaway decided to become an academic specialising in the Soviet Union, his activist interests were at least as strong as his scholarly ones. He ...”

“... in secondary schools and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the Troubles. Each of these ...”

“... and disdainful Ganguly, particularly loathsome, whereas one gets the feeling that they reckon Michael Vaughan to be a thoroughly decent bloke – more or less one of their own. Cricket has undoubtedly gained hugely from the friendly rivalry of this Ashes series, particularly by way of comparison with other sports, above all football, which seems a ...”

“... the end of the 1930s necessarily included hunger marchers, stay-down miners, Left Book Clubbers, black-coffin bearers, China campaigners, India Leaguers, Howard Leaguers, associates of Artists International, International Brigaders, Trotskyites, Communists, pacifists failed by their tribunals. The playwright David Hare declared recently that working-class ...”