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“... me in a carbon childhood by this huge swollen river all along a mill village – soot bracken and stone where Mrs Jubb and Mr Jubb whose leathery right hand had its thumb missing – where they lived in a back to back in a deep warm kitchen with a big kettle like a pet lived by the music of that bulgy river that bulgy bulgy river wider and deeper and slopping ...”

“... opposed both to the ‘pitiless bronze’ of ancient weapons and armour, and to the blockish stone sculptures with which they had to share ancient exhibition space, unmalleable marbles that could never imagine kicking back so high and with such abandon, unless the raised leg was supported by a fortuitous tree stump. This same exquisite poise, albeit in ...”

“... serving us, for instance, Lou Reed stumbling around in New York, the New York Dolls in Paris and Brian Wilson in ‘psychicpain’, as well as Iggy Pop and the Rolling Stones. Chapters on later stars like Morrissey, Guns ’N’ Roses and Happy Mondays lack this vivid authenticity. Looking back, you can see why Kent made such an impact. When he started ...”

“... not even regular exposure to the Ring cycle can assuage. Confidently predicting, in 1977, that Brian Inglis’s book Natural and Supernatural would be greeted by a chorus of rejection from terrified scientists, Levin never noticed that it was greeted by a chorus of indifference. Fantasising flat out, Levin insists that Science is blindly determined to deny ...”

“... will remind me that I’ve never really wanted to live the life of anyone else, not even a Rolling Stone. Or especially. I haven’t bought a Stones album since Sticky Fingers in 1971 and haven’t deliberately listened to anything they recorded after Exile on Main Street a year later. I find Mick Jagger’s dancing embarrassingly inept and can never remember ...”

“... for over an hour talking to Neal Ascherson. It was one of those freezing January evenings – cold stone, long shadows – and we adopted our BBC faces in Poets’ Corner, looking at the memorials and marble busts on the walls. I noticed Ascherson was taking his time over an inscription to the poet Thomas Campbell, and some words of Campbell’s began to echo ...”

“... a few months as chief Tory press spokesman, there will be no holds barred. No doubt Tory chairman Brian Mawhinney will be in close touch with his colleague Peter Griffiths, the MP for Portsmouth North, who first won a seat in Parliament in Smethwick, in the general election of 1964, by concentrating heavily on the race issue. It was in that election, without ...”

“... bubble. The man is a harbinger of death, showing how the bloom in its misty bubble is dead as a stone, how the beat of my heart in time with his journey is steadily slower. Other poems recall the mother in a hospital bed, fed with oxygen through a tube in the throat, or with head battered and shaved – a painful, poignant image that also figures in ...”

“... souls remembered how spectacularly wrong the pollsters were last year in Britain. But even when Brian Mulroney’s demise in Canada fell like a gift into Labour’s lap, and the polls swung back at the last minute, I couldn’t believe that a government which had been ten years in office, with a million people unemployed, could possibly get back (let alone ...”

“... be waged in tones of measured common sense tuned to the innocently offended ear-drum. Of Professor Brian Cox much was hoped. His Black Paper past promised drills and canons, rote and rigour. The report’s chapter on literature teaching is dull: but the report as a whole will be a disappointment for all those who were looking forward to their ill-tempered ...”

“... figures that seemed to me the very worst thing about him, a view reinforced ten years later by Brian and Michael in their song about Lowry’s ‘matchstalk men and matchstalk cats and dogs’. Those figures now seem to me to express an enormous thoughtfulness about the conditions and effects of life in industrial towns; and ...”

“... a straight bat. A book may be lurking there, as it must in many other corners of the legal attic. Brian Simpson himself embarked on such an enterprise some years ago with the 19th-century case, known to every law student, of the Crown v. Dudley and Stephens – the captain and mate of the yacht Mignonette who survived a ship-wreck by eating the cabin boy and ...”

“... Something in the cool, sun-stippled hazel grove I don’t understand – a low wall made of dressed stone, large thin flat slabs, no mortar, but packed with small stones to bind them. Then the remains of a lower wall running up against it, making the corner of a rectangle. I pull away moss and earth, and find a stone-paved floor, the hazel bushes growing up through it ...”

“... we think about shifts in climate, both large and small, and how they have affected people. Indeed, Brian Fagan takes the view that climate change has fundamentally shaped the course of civilisation. This is his third book on the topic (his earlier works examined floods and the Little Ice Age) and in it he uses the unprecedented accuracy of newly recovered ...”

“... impostor’ who had promulgated ‘intentional perversion and mystification’. In Kathmandu, Brian Houghton Hodgson was stranded for years with little to do for his employer, the East India Company, and passed the time collecting ornithological specimens for the British Museum and Buddhist scriptures. The original, Sanskrit versions of Buddhist texts had ...”