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“... were once plentiful in Dublin. I became interested in a gloss on page 1230 which states that ‘Michael Begnal suggests, perhaps not entirely seriously, that she [Martha Clifford, from whom Bloom receives a letter] is actually Ignatius Gallaher.’ This thesis, we learn from the copious bibliography, was first aired by Begnal in the James Joyce Quarterly in ...”

“... the Host into the body of Christ cracked like an egg. In his book Goodbye! Good Men, author Michael Rose writes that the liberalised rules set up a takeover of seminaries by homosexuals.   Vatican II liberalised rules but left the most outdated one: celibacy. That vow was put in place originally because the Church did not want heirs making claims on ...”

“... the way water seemed to me when I was young and still seems now: sustaining, brown, benign – or white, decisive, invigorating, rushing over a weir, churning from the back of a boat. Having been adopted, I was spared the binding notion of blood, with all its passion and fatalism. I simply took the platitude and stood it on its head. I am no longer sure what ...”

“... of the fight still on him. The truest literary account of Vietnam is generally taken to be Michael Herr’s Dispatches – a work whose title declares it to be a direct communication from the front. The hitherto most-applauded novel of Vietnam, John Del Vecchio’s The Thirteenth Valley (1982), was written by a former member of the 101st Airborne ...”

“... all those tumbling, ambiguous green metaphors. Inundation, crushed lungs, steepling walls of white water, Frankenstein’s monster liberated from his Arctic prison, cities swallowed in the chilling rush. The fears were out. Weather as threat, like Larkin’s sexual intercourse, began with the Beatles. It was canonised from the pulpit by Gregory Bateson ...”

“... Paper in 1986 conceded an at best ‘modest success’. It proposed the Community Charge, which a White Paper in 1983 had declared ‘unworkable’. But by then, many local authorities were having to account creatively and borrow from abroad. To the Government’s delight, that reduced what they needed from the Treasury in 1986-87 by more than a billion. And ...”

“... a long flight to Jakarta. ‘Eric Lustbader?’ suggested Sean, and I shook my head. I’d seen Michael Herr sending dispatches. The hours flew by. The Beach is studded with non-cinematic references to popular culture of the same Eighties vintage: Atari and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David Attenborough’s Life on ...”

“... one response to this dilemma, and is the response which the Oxford edition favours. But then, as Michael Warren argued in a 1977 article on ‘Repunctuation as Interpretation’, modern punctuation ‘has rhetorical implications, and its intrusion inevitably affects the phrasing and, especially for the actor, the intonation of the speech; the most innocent ...”

“... crude an indicator. British Social Attitudes breaks down responses by age, by sex, by the great white or blue-collar divide, by political or religious affiliation, but not by social class, colour or geographic setting. The State of the Nation is concerned with the gulf between rich and poor, but its main concern is where power and influence lie. It is ...”

“... attempts he met defeat. Clearly it is the SDP connection Which has supplied the upsurge of white heat That melts the Tory vote to a minority And Labour’s to abject inferiority. This Pitt falls far short of so grand a name. Long in the beard, he’s less so in the legs. He lacks the stature for his sudden fame. It’s plain that of the Pitts he is the ...”

“... some beech trees the car turns a corner and I catch sight of a Presbyterian meeting-house – white, shining, Neoclassical, two gold Greek letters above the door. He’s in a rush so I don’t ask to go back and look at this living image of the Ulster Enlightenment. I don’t remember ever having noticed it before. Later that day I’m walking along Ozone ...”

“... fellow you mentioned just now could ever have stood up to him!’ In the end he buys the girl Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs instead. Any less unsophisticated reader who has come upon any of the Allan Quatermain sequence – which ran to 18 books – is bound, however, to remember the figure of Sir Henry Curtis, Bt. the English Victorian quasi-Viking whom ...”

“... blame for Plath’s death. In this story, Plath arrives at Cambridge immaculate, with her gold and white Samsonite luggage, her neat Smith College clothes, her shiny freshly-washed blond hair. And England drags her under, dirties her, releases the true poetic self, which is ‘aggressive, rude ... disorderly, sexual’. In death she is ‘the little defeated ...”

“... She bared all about self-harm and her frequent calls, during her bulimic phase, on the great white telephone. She fondled children and animals, dabbled in New Age pursuits, kibitzed in operating theatres and had been stiffed on a pedalo by the thick-set offspring of a Levantine grocer. In op-ed fable she presented the Windsor family’s lone human ...”

“... A British astronaut would have stuck in a flag and said: “I name this moon Elizabeth.”’ And Michael Collins – the Apollo 11 astronaut left behind orbiting in the command module – was the first of several Apollonians who suggested eventually sending a ‘priest, poet or philosopher’: ‘From these people you might get a much better feeling of what ...”