“... was uneventful, ‘at least until it started to go wrong’. From articled pupil in the office of John Hutchison, a local architect, he went to the more eminent firm of Honeyman and Keppie as a draughtsman while studying part-time at the GSA, then housed in rooms above the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street, just round the corner from the current ...”

“... at him. The idea was conceived as a revisiting of a book by one of Parr’s photographic heroes, John Hinde. Hinde’s Exmoor Village, published in 1947, was a study of Luccombe, but that had already, in a sense, gone. It now belongs to the National Trust and so, Parr concludes, is ‘completely stuck in the past’. He went to Chew Stoke instead. It had ...”

“... half-whisper that someone called Colm Tóibín was in the library looking at the correspondence of John Butler Yeats, which had been transcribed, then typed, then donated to the library by William M. Murphy, John Butler Yeats’s biographer. And now I looked up from the Yeats letters to find a man looking at me. It struck me ...”

“... the American Revolution remain a conundrum. Why did the colonies that had supported Britain in its North American struggle against France between 1754 and 1763 turn so quickly against Britain’s relatively benign parliamentary government? Understandably enough, British attempts after 1763 to make the colonists contribute to the costs of imperial defence ...”

“... the author has the least notion that they were fighting anything but a just and honourable war. John Terraine’s book is much more ambitious in scope, embracing the submarine aspects of both world wars and giving a general view of the whole struggle in which they were a part; it is intended for the general reader; and it is written for the most part in a ...”

“... McEwan, I tried to call you on the radio telephone, when our old flatmate, John Webb, fell overboard in a gale off the coast of Long Island a few years ago and was nearly swept south to Bermuda. But the old Oxford number had been disconnected, and your publisher told me that you were ‘indisputably a hugely important literary phenomenon’ and not taking any calls ...”

“... prefer it enough to refrain from doing what he wanted to do.’ Tate spent much of his life in the North, and the events of the Sixties changed his views about the people he was still, in 1961, calling the ‘Nigras’ (he advocated a generous version of what he was willing to call Apartheid), but he remained always a Southern writer, a man of that ...”

“... the terminal rim, I would hesitate to take bets that resurrection is ruled out. Thirty years ago John Updike gave us in Rabbit Run Harold ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, the basketball-player lately wed to tippling slatternly Janice Springer, who failed to cope. When baby Becky drowns through the negligence of Janice, Rabbit runs away. In Rabbit Redux, the title ...”

“... inventive faculty is always glad of a reality-principle, no matter how earthy or matter-of-fact. (John Ashbery’s poem, ‘My Erotic Double’, is an interesting variant of this theme.) The Death of the Body ends with a telegram informing Uta of the fate of two of the characters – and it is striking how little we suddenly find we care about any of ...”

“... their fleas) who marched through the Piedmont countryside. The epidemic raged through the north, only slowing when it reached the natural barrier of the Apennines. On the other side of the mountains, Florence braced itself. The officials of the Sanità, the city’s health board, wrote anxiously to their colleagues in Milan, Verona, Venice, in the ...”

“... cold. Pepys looked at the megaliths in 1668 and shrugged: ‘God knows what their use was.’ John Aubrey, the first person to make a serious study of stone circles, put his finger on the problem: ‘These Antiquities are so exceeding old that no Bookes doe reach them.’ He developed a more effective method. Using measurements and comparative surveys of ...”

“... by ‘political correctness’. Thus, in discussing the impact of the early settlers on the North American environment, he cites not William Cronon’s Changes in the Land (1983), now the standard work on the subject, but Civilisation and Climate by Ellsworthy Huntington, published in 1925. His account of the Reconstruction era after the Civil War ...”

“... under my feet then drifted, swole, each bubble’s angle reflecting a diamond nova from both its north and south pole.’ The swole/pole consonance is an alienation effect, immediately drawing attention to the writer’s exertions, and one wonders where exactly Morvern’s lexicology had encountered the Miltonic ‘swole’ or the astronomical precision of ...”

“... Kingdom – so that there was nothing for the Loyalists to remain loyal to – an independent North would be the only homeland that many could abide. As to negotiating with Gerry Adams and other Republicans, for Peter Robinson it is literally a case of over my dead body. He said: ‘You’re talking about many, many years. It’s probably ...”

“... mischievous matchmakers, innocent fun, uileann pipes, sea-wind in the hair. Even if you swap John Ford’s Ireland for something more urban and contemporary, say that of Roddy Doyle, in which a good night out is more likely to involve soul music and a ‘ride’, it is still possible to find yourself idealising: Ford and Doyle (pre-Paddy Clarke and ...”