“... simple, and astonishingly addictive. Towards the other extreme of sophistication on the BBC was Michael Jakobsen’s Citadel, in which you had to explore a large castle and its environs, picking up keys, unlocking doors, shooting large, malevolent monks between the eyes, taking chickens from the freezer and roasting them in the kitchen, boiling up bones in ...”

“... American Ambassadors to Japan – Thomas Foley, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Michael Armacost, the president of the Brookings Institution, and Walter Mondale, Carter’s Vice-President – wrote a joint letter to the Washington Post denouncing Congress for its willingness even to think about helping former American slave labourers get ...”

“... of space flight became credible, there were no aliens; instead there were green men who hid in the woods. In the same way, psychotic delusions keep up with scientific change: the people once pursued by phantasms of the dead are now pestered by living celebrities who watch them from inside their TV sets, and those who used to confess themselves possessed now ...”

“... Martenot, a theremin-like instrument; and, above all, the birdsong he transcribed on walks in the woods. This collage of elements lent itself to an expansive, often lavish orchestration, but it also left him open to the charge of an all too permissive eclecticism. For some of his students, notably Boulez, the problem wasn’t that Messiaen was too rigorous a ...”

“... working waterway. Such literary instincts predate Darwin, of course: when Wordsworth subtitled ‘Michael’, the saddest of all his works, ‘A Pastoral Poem’, he was making a tendentious point about the facts that you might actually face as a sheep farmer, as opposed to the literary stuff you get in one of those ‘pastoral’ poems. ...”

“... Official-Secrets-Act government establishments is that they are very good for wildlife. Thick woods, screening concrete bunkers and hunchbacked huts from the eyes of the curious, provide an excellent habitat for shy fauna, for monkjacks. During a period when sheep and pigs and cows, all the nursery favourites, were being taken out by snipers and bulldozed ...”

“... them in their vices and so can be blamed for failing to get them to stop. ‘Who enabled Tiger Woods?’ is one of those questions, like ‘Who lost China?’, that seems to demand an answer, when really it is just a way of avoiding the fact that Tiger Woods, like China, is responsible for his own misfortunes. Enablers ...”

“... without ration cards by which they can be identified) while welcoming Michael Jackson. Mumbai, however, is not merely a local name for the city; the renaming was not just an act of official translation but an announcement of a new phase in the city’s history and self-definition. While ‘Bombay’ invoked the world of the ...”

“... the social history of the Wye Valley and what life might have been like for any vagrants in those woods. ‘Political readers,’ Bromwich observes, ‘are keen on denying Wordsworth the praise and to some extent the pardon he seems to solicit for his change of heart’ from radical idealism to a chastened humanism. Instead, Bromwich tries to chart ...”

“... over which time passes-a false light. In his introduction to the New Collected Works, Michael Davidson calls Discrete Series a ‘rather modest book’, but this is true only of its size. Andrew Crozier is surely right to say, in Modern American Poetry (1984), that it is ‘almost too deliberately calculated, with an unconcealed but obscure ...”

“... and uneasy. When, towards the end of Astor’s editing career, the South African journalist Donald Woods proposed a series of interviews with him, Astor suggested that the theme shouldn’t be ‘How did a rich boy come to be so idealistic?’ but ‘How did a cripple come to have some success?’ By ‘cripple’ he meant mental not physical damage. Only many ...”

“... as ‘the practical expression’ of ‘the spirit of Dunkirk and the Blitz’. (Weight misses Michael Foot’s 1949 pamphlet on domestic reform entitled Who Are the Patriots Now?) A different kind of identity came to fruition during the Attlee Administration: new institutions were called ‘National’ or ‘British’ instead of ‘Royal’ – the ...”

“... Tolstoy meeting Chertkov. She hears her husband is going to see Chertkov and runs off through the woods, down gulleys, over the fields, binoculars in hand, to a ditch near where Chertkov lives, and there lies in wait. Tolstoy doesn’t come. She hunkers down after dark in the grounds of Yasnaya Polyana and is found, exhausted and frozen, and brought back to ...”

“... minds of that third-rate decade, the Sixties’ – betrayed a shaky grasp of cultural history. (Michael Foot’s description of Tebbit as ‘a semi-house-trained polecat’ may have revealed an equally shaky grasp of natural history, yet still seemed nearer the mark.) There was no pleasing either side in that divided decade: Arthur Scargill was as hostile ...”

“... with him his teenage son plus a bottle of wine, hoping that Sue would take the young man into the woods and initiate him into the arts of love. None of them had any doubt that this was a woman of the world whereas Sue was actually quite shy and couldn’t see that she had given them any cause to think otherwise. She hadn’t; she just looked like a Scarlet ...”