“... stories he told. Only four days after the Birmingham speech, Ann Dummett, wife of the philosopher Michael Dummett and a community relations officer in Oxford, wrote to the Times that the anecdote about the widow from Wolverhampton had been recounted to her in Oxford recently, but about an old lady in London: ‘Almost every circumstantial detail was the ...”

“... delicacy to be found in a Constable cloud study as they could possibly be. And he is right: the white clouds in Palmer’s luminously bright cloud pictures (there is one in the Ashmolean, another in Manchester City Art Gallery) are anything but airy and breezy. The Magic Apple Tree struck Herbert as beautiful and peculiar in equal measure: ‘bright crimson ...”

“... What is this? ‘Two miles behind it a jet of white steam was travelling from the left to the right of the picture.’ It is a train, viewed across a valley, in Jude the Obscure (1895), and it is the only sentence offered there about this train. Flaubert is always described as the great cinematic novelist, the great novelist of detail, and indeed Flaubert has his own described train-steam too – similarly seen, in L’Education sentimentale, across fields, but ‘stretched out in a horizontal line, like a gigantic ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away ...”

“... 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   Vatican II liberalised rules but left the most outdated one: celibacy.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 ...”