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“... seems nonplussed when faced with her cousin’s fiction, writes that Harold Carrington ‘did not burn Leonora’s rocking horse, because it was still there … when my father was a child’. Carrington was expelled from her first convent school, the Holy Sepulchre in Essex (for ‘mental deficiency’) and then from St Mary’s, Ascot, where the nuns saw ...”

“... no cuts and no ‘austerity’ packages. In the absence of anyone with a mandate to slash and burn, Belgian public sector spending is puttering along much as it always was; hence the continuing growth of their economy. It turns out that from the economic point of view, in the current crisis, no government is better than any government – any existing ...”

“... Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and Robert Ballard, Isabel Nathaniel and Peter Didsbury, Anthony Edkins and Brian Cosgrove. Several get prizes, and in particular Andrew Motion gets the big one, £5,000, for a poem that either is, or successfully if pointlessly pretends to ...”

“... enraged if a single word is uttered to acknowledge the act. The mad scramble to pull socks onto Gordon, who was otherwise dressed to the nines – in his funeral casket. And the sewer rat that crept out of the commode to chew off the testicles of some day-dreaming old man. Any lingering Falwellian prejudice evaporates in the living rooms of the families who ...”

“... for existence requires an attention we wouldn’t agree to if we understood its scope.’ For Gordon’s compulsively equivocating narrators, ‘ordinary life’ is a baffling country for which they must keep drafting provisional maps even though the topography forever shifts, resisting categorisation and dissolving its own signposts. The narrators keep ...”

“... extraordinary presence and it’s right that there should be people living here again. Across the burn to the north the wild pasture has been half-colonised by marram, and its curved jade-green wires make a crayoning of paler colour against the sappy mosses and grasses on which the sheep feed. This westward-running stripe of marram is evidence of the deathly ...”

“... of the last bare-chested poll tax samurai? Fire-watchers. Flame freaks. Black air groupies. ‘Burn, baby, burn.’ The dialectic is of secondary interest to the class warrior, who is, before anything else, an arsonist, a connoisseur of incendiary icons. These pages are so much kindling. They stink of siphoned ...”

“... ever swept away’. Under Storm’s Wing should be read alongside Thomas’s insecure Letters to Gordon Bottomley – just as his poetry requires its full literary-historical context. Last year the Thomas marriage suffered trial by LRB letter-page. John Pikoulis accused Jonathan Barker of editorially fudging his contentions that ‘the breach between ...”

“... for insight into the politics and the personalities with whom Robin Cook was involved. She met Gordon Brown just after her marriage, but has ‘little remaining impression of Gordon, whom I have met only once or twice since then, and he seems, like many famous people who start their careers almost as child prodigies, to ...”

“... like being whispered to in a language partly understood. At the entrance to the once-used ground a burn is crossed by a single squared timber, bleached silver-gray. In places the moor plants grow in a corduroy, showing where the people made feannagan, ‘lazy-beds’, cutting the turf with their spades and turning it inwards to make a raised baulk, fertilised ...”

“... the UEA coffee bar, when the tea melted through his cheap plastic cup and spilled a second-degree burn on his thigh. I’d literally just walked into the place off the plane from Ohio University to spend a year studying political history at UEA. By noon we had met up with two girls Ian knew and, by evening, the four of us had consumed a clean lid of ...”

“... other, with its copper sink, filled and emptied by hand, but cherished by my mother as a place to burn bundles of rubbish. Sheets were boiled in it, turned with a stout stick that soap and hot water slowly disintegrated. The last time I saw the place new owners had substantially rationalised it. It was, I now realise, a physical environment that would have ...”

“... activities at the White House. Evidence soon pointed to the other accomplice at the lookout, Gordon Liddy, legal counsel to CREEP. The situation was complicated, because in some respects the Nixon administration was investigating itself. The FBI was a division of the Justice Department, and therefore part of the executive branch of the US ...”

“... and his partner at the time, an American surrealist painter called Gloria de Herrera, had to burn the money. (He hadn’t numbered the bills, as a precaution.) ‘I watched a year of work go up in flames,’ he recalled. ‘I liked … seeing the banknotes burn up.’ He was ‘elated’ at the thought of peace.Some of ...”

“... praying in unison, or lying in pools of blood; boys squabbling in an empty swimming-pool; women in burn wards, or begging in burqas. Kabul is a South Asian city of millions. Bollywood music blares out in its crowded spice markets and flower gardens, but it seems that images conveying colour and humour are reserved for Rajasthan.Barack Obama, in a recent ...”