“... was one of the ‘gate-crashers’ of whom Mr Gittings writes so disapprovingly. I entered by the north transept door merely by showing my visiting-card and was ushered into a choir stall just where the coffin came to a halt. The pallbearers or chief mourners were an odd assembly. First came the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and the Leader of the ...”

“... the casualty of the Falklands War, although if blame is to be allocated, I would place it on Sir John Nott, the Secretary of State for Defence, whose policy of running down the Royal Navy (with Mrs Thatcher’s support) gave the Junta the signal it sought to embark on a bit of smash and grab. I was on the platform at the sensational meeting of the ...”

“... of Hutcheson and the Ulster Enlightenment of the 18th century is what is now needed both south and north of the border. He might have added that it was the Union that effectively extinguished it. ‘Heathcliff and the Great Hunger’ is the title of Eagleton’s first chapter, but it is not sufficiently indicative of the book as a whole. It inserts Brontë’s ...”

“... arranged for Jill Biden to pay a visit to a Coke job-training programme in Brazil, joined Joe and John Kerry for the unveiling of the Coke-sponsored 2014 World Cup trophy, and tagged along with Jill as part of a government delegation to Cuba, which happens to be one of only two countries in the world where Coke can’t be bought or sold (the other is ...”

“... takes on a particularly graphic edge when you’re reading Robertson. Robertson was born on the north-east coast of Scotland. He can write wonderfully about Scottish coasts and myths, and is temperamentally a northern island or isthmus dweller. In that respect he’s like John Burnside, to whom he dedicated his best poem ...”

“... he been pronounced a traitor by James Clapper (former director of National Intelligence) and John Brennan (former director of the CIA)? How much more do you want? It didn’t strike them that these sources retained the dubious habits of exaggeration or distortion that had once prompted them to lie to Congress (in Brennan’s case, regarding the CIA ...”

“... liberation. Despite this, Garvey was taken up by the religion as a divinely inspired prophet, the John the Baptist of Rastafari. By 1940, he too was in England. Haile Selassie declined an invitation to meet him. Garvey died that year, a fact that many of his unwanted followers refused to believe, and since Haile Selassie’s reported demise in 1975 his own ...”

“... On the whole the young Thesiger belonged to the second category. He read the novels of John Buchan and Rider Haggard, Jim Corbett’s tales of tiger hunting, Rowland Ward’s Records of Big Game, Blackwood’s Tales from the Outposts, Jock of the Bushveld, Henri de Monfreid’s account of smuggling across the Red Sea, Churchill’s The River War ...”

“... to rainforests. Conniff is particularly good on the early history of species ‘bagging’ in North America. Every ornithologist will know the name of John James Audubon, but there were many other impressive pioneers in recording life on the continent. I hadn’t realised the extent to which Thomas Jefferson, for ...”

“... with the arid coastal areas near Luanda, in Angola, and the savannahs of the plateau further north. These deep-rooted connections meant that slaving wars in one area influenced the political stability of the rest of the region. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, Kongo and Ndongo – the kingdom at the heart of what is now Angola – fractured into ...”

“... Keith Ridgway used to be compared to John McGahern for his dourly lyrical stories of a changing Ireland. (‘Fr Devoy nodded his head and sipped his tea and waited. He watched the sky move and thought he saw rain in the distance but could not be sure.’) That stopped with the publication of his third novel, Animals, in 2006 ...”

“... and replacing the nationalist agenda with the world view of the European New Left (think of John Lennon)’. Their targets included Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, who were criticised for peopling their work with neurotic characters; leading artists, for following cosmopolitan fashion; educationalists, for the decline in the teaching of the Bible, the Talmud ...”

“... Describing a walk from Epping Forest to Glinton in the LRB (he followed the route taken by John Clare when he escaped from the asylum to which he had been committed), he says he felt released from any obligation ‘to log tedious information, to pick up leaflets at every church, to quiz dog walkers or learn the history of every deleted asylum’. And ...”

“... this novel’, confesses to the source of his title (‘The Rotters’ Club, by Hatfield and the North, released in 1975, is available on Virgin Records’), notes that ‘Section 1 of “The Chick and the Hairy Guy” contains quotations from genuine lonely hearts advertisements in Sounds (1973)’ and Section 3 ‘quotations from the magazines Woman ...”

“... to create perfect miniatures, to take no major risks.’ On the other hand, you could say, as John Gross has done, that the fault is in the eye of the beholder: ‘While Americans think we’re miniaturists, English people tend to think Americans suffer from gigantism.’ Shields responds to such charges more indignantly in her latest novel, Unless, set a ...”