“... a girl like you, the best novel of Amis’s earlier years. That previous heroine was, in theory, North Country English, and the hero’s sad grotesque friend a Thames Valley Scot. But the Welsh Rhiannon and her Malcolm (whom the end of the novel leaves not altogether unhappily putting his love into his translation of Welsh Medieval verse) are to all intents ...”

“... is a for-profit run by a military contractor, Caliburn International. The anti-immigrant zealot John Kelly – once considered the only ‘adult’ in the White House when he was chief of staff – joined Caliburn’s board immediately after leaving government.*In a televised interview with Vice President Pence, the host reads from an article about the ...”

“... political history this century, from Rufus Isaacs to Horatio Bottomley to Maundy Gregory to John Poulson, is littered with great corruption stories. The explanation for the increase in sleaze under Thatcher and Major is not to be found in any particular scandal, nor in the sudden susceptibility of certain individuals to corruption. Contemporary sleaze ...”

“... home-grown products that had nothing to do with the white man. The growing presence in Europe and North America of wave after wave of non-white immigrants added considerable animus to the tirades. The events of 11 September tipped the scales definitively. Oddly, from the 1980s, this process coincided with the rise of post-colonial studies in British and ...”

“... about the exhibition also is the various views it has of Cumberland Market, the great horse-market north of Euston Road where the 1950s Regent’s Park estate now stands. It was bombed during the war, or so it’s always said, though it was probably recoverable and from the various drawings on show in the exhibition one can see how these days it might have ...”

“... a national body of verse. When she does mention Scottish anthologists, editors and publishers – John Bell (The Poets of Great Britain), Robert Anderson (Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain) and Thomas Campbell (Specimens of the British Poets) – Bucknell doesn’t comment on the way they promoted through their works’ titles a ...”

“... this, both in general and in particular. He rejects the uniformity model, and with it the common North European claim that national variants on pay and conditions impede fair competition. ‘If Portugal, Greece, southern Italy and parts of Spain, not to mention Ireland and much of Britain, are to revive their economies,’ he writes, ‘they must be allowed ...”

“... In later years the scene darkened. There was an intellectual restlessness abroad in the college. John Maynard Keynes appeared (from Eton, indeed, where he had been in Pop), and as a very junior fellow announced that he had ‘had a good look round this place and come to the conclusion that it’s pretty inefficient.’ Plainly, rows lay ahead, and Monty ...”

“... not? Legal or not? Playing God? Her existence was made possible by the work of Patrick Steptoe, a North Country obstetrician, and Bob Edwards, a Cambridge physiologist. In his 1983 Horizon Lecture on BBC Television, Edwards described their search for moral guidelines: We have looked for inspiration to philosophers, theologians, lawyers, for their wisdom ...”

“... for the poetry, his commentary is more than a touch reminiscent of Dr Kinbote’s stalking of John Shade’s poetic essence in Pale Fire. He leads the increasingly reluctant reader as though in a seminar, speculating on the significance of the not very significant. Despite his eloquent beginning, on Menlove’s austerely happy home background, his book ...”

“... several of the most important members of the reigning Whig Junto – the Duke of Shrewsbury, Sir John Somers, Lord-Keeper of the Great Seal and soon to be Lord High Chancellor, Lord Romney, Sir Edward Russell the First Lord of the Admiralty, and some others – to join him in a scheme by which Kidd was to be sent after the pirates in a vessel provided by the ...”

“... impatience with Romantic antiquarianism can be sensed in the Short History when he comments on John Montague’s poem about a group of old country neighbours: ‘Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people.’ These old people, who inspire mixed feelings of tenderness and repugnance, are compared by the poet to a ‘standing circle of stones’. For ...”

“... this ugly reality. Their incomplete mental adjustment to the fact of partition is the subject of John Bowman’s remarkable study. His revisionist stance may seem unnecessarily aggressive – it is after all no secret that in the private session of Dail Eireann on 22 December 1921 de Valera endorsed the so-called ‘county option’ – but he points out ...”

“... in a bed and asleep at their desks in the remedial class. The head of a primary school in the North-East recounts a conversation with the Chairman of the Education Committee, who asked whether the school was successful. His criteria for success turn out to be O and A-Level results. ‘Pie in the sky,’ replied the head. ‘If you look at my attendance ...”

“... contemporary English poetry seems to have set itself a Herculean task: one named by the Scot John Burnside in ‘Source Code’ – to ‘imagine the suburbs’, in a déjà vu in which, repeatedly, ‘the same life happens again.’ As the poem’s title suggests, the task requires the encoding of difference, of imaginary origins and ends, rather than ...”