“... communicated to correspondents, but the actual process of composition will remain something of a black box. With the exception of ‘Little Gidding’ (or ‘Spittle-Skidding’ as Eliot whimsically termed it in a letter to Hayward), the writing of which was a more protracted process, these poems took shape off-stage, in relatively condensed bursts of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... dying horses and abandoned children. In The Element of Crime (1984), a ravaged cop called Fisher (Michael Elphick) struggles through a flooded landscape, trying to solve a crime. Fisher is a particularly bad detective: he has an affair with a prostitute who turns out to have been the lover of the murderer he is trying to find, then he accidentally murders the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... powers to set the house in order. His preferred candidate for the role was Eduard Karl Joseph Michael Marcus Antonius Koloman Volkhold Maria Habsburg-Lothringen, Hungary’s ambassador to the Holy See. The back-up, in case Habsburg proved unavailable, was the commander of the Pontifical Swiss Guard.As an analyst of the modern administrative ...”

“... to make it clear to everyone how much you want to win. “You have to want it,” he said, like Michael Jordan demanding the ball in the final moments of a game.’ But when provoked, he reaches for a different analogy. On his last overseas trip as president, Obama complains to Rhodes about how he was let down. ‘He couldn’t believe the election was ...”

“... many suggestions he made that evening was that, when I was in Dublin again, I should go and see Michael Yeats, the son of the poet, who might be glad to meet someone who was interested in his grandfather as much as his father – and to spend time with someone who was brought up, as I was, in a Fianna Fáil family (Fianna Fáil being at the time the main ...”

“... of homosexuality in 1967 had opened up new possibilities, but the thaw was gradual. Michael Holroyd’s great biography of Lytton Strachey, published that year, was prophetic of an unembarrassed candour about gay lives, rather than a response to new freedoms; P.N. Furbank’s Life of Forster was still two years in the future, and other ...”

“... introduced her to the celluloid experiments of Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, Andy Warhol and Michael Snow. At Chelsea’s Elgin Theatre, they watched Snow’s La Région centrale on a loop: ‘a three-hour film about a landscape with stones, blue and grey, and all the possible camera movements over this landscape … I have never been so moved, so ...”

“... her to wear, the ‘large fawn cardigan with a hood’ she knitted herself, her Roman sandals, a black mantilla for going to church in Andorra. She was someone to whom people gave things, and perhaps the categorisation she resented was often a misplaced gift. She couldn’t easily be defined by her romantic relationships and didn’t ‘hold down a ...”

“... the Olympic charter. Barcelona’s triumph was not its new pedestrian squares, but the presence of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and the rest of the US basketball ‘dream team’.What was Olympism without amateurism? Samaranch attempted to fill the ideological void by bringing the IOC into line with the emerging concerns of international politics in the ...”

“... of unplanned pregnancies – Arthur Seaton, for instance, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or Michael Caine’s Alfie – while the women suffer, from their men as much as their abortions. The moral question faced by these men, who until now have been indiscriminately handing round their penises, is whether they will take responsibility for the sex that ...”