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“... Stillness and Speed: My Story by Dennis Bergkamp (Arsenal striker, 1995-2006); Addicted by Tony Adams (Arsenal centre-back, 1983-2002); and, now, Arsène Wenger’s My Life in Red and White. Arsène Wenger on the touchline at the Emirates Stadium, 29 March 2014. The Premier League has come a long way since it started nearly thirty years ...”

“... to configure a sensibility and vindicate her choice. Best of all, she gives us 16 pages of Charles Wright. His compact lyrics gleam and smoulder. Their differential, not random, variety offers more to the anthologist than can be cancelled by Wright’s conviction that ‘the New Poem ... will not be photogenic.’ Whether ...”

“... won’t find, for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by Polygon ...”

“... from the permanent government continued. After Labour had won the election of October 1974, Tony Benn was appointed Secretary of State at the Department of Industry. On his first day in the office he was greeted by his Permanent Secretary, Sir Anthony Part, with the words: ‘I presume, Secretary of State, that you do not intend to implement the ...”

“... A major in the Royal Anglian Regiment talks to Tony Parker about battle: I’ve only been in that kind of situation where someone’s been shooting at me, a total of about twelve times altogether – in Ireland, in Aden, and we had a couple of dust-ups with the Eoka lot in Cyprus. You get a little bit of headiness out of the situation, you do, because that’s what you’ve been trained for ...”

“... however, Trimble blotted his copybook by allowing himself to be seen in conversation with Billy Wright, the Loyalist assassin who was himself later shot dead in prison in the most spectacular circumstances. Trimble’s cheerleaders at Westminster were not pleased, though he was doing no more than following the principle laid down by Carson and Craig: obey ...”

“... for reassurance about the wonders of male normalcy. They look for all this in the way people like Tony Parsons have taught them, in a spirit of soft-core irony and hard-core sentiment. But apart from reassurance and a sort of avenging pride, what are these magazines selling to their readers? With their grisly combinations of sensitivity and debasement ...”

“... British politics at the moment seem curiously provisional. The failures of the present government are so gross and obvious that hardly anyone, even its nominal supporters, attempts to defend it ideologically. Yet at the same time hardly anyone believes that Labour will really win the next election, or that it could cope even if it did. There is also a strong sense that the re-ordering of continental Europe, whose outcome is itself indeterminate, has rendered our political life even more provisional: it has obliterated the old landmarks but made it quite unclear where we now go ...”

“... talks, the recent Loyalist killings of Catholics in retaliation for the killing of Billy Wright by the INLA, and the recent IRA killings of a drug dealer and a Loyalist paramilitary in Belfast have all raised questions about the viability of the peace process. Nevertheless, the fact remains that had Adams and the Republican leadership not encouraged ...”

“... of the weak moment . . . to say the easier more attractive thing’. His remarks to David Wright about Wright’s ‘Walking to Dedham’ would seem quelling had they not been made in the context of a flatteringly close reading: the first phrase which weakens is – ‘the wisdom of the year’. ‘Year’ in ...”

“... Counties as the ‘laboratory’ of modern British police tactics.So the disclosures made by Peter Wright, for whatever sordid motive, turn out to be a better guide to reality than the naive social-democratic belief in the impartiality of the permanent government. Nothing is more depressing, in Milne’s narrative, than the eagerness of Neil Kinnock and Norman ...”

“... film, including the first stark naked one (seen by the audience chastely from the back), by Maggie Wright in an RSC production of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus. Such economies are prudent, but the boundaries between representations of Helen and of the politics of war keep collapsing, and it’s a pity to ignore the sharp and timely elements in Helen’s story that ...”

“... an all-round amoral charmer and shit, immune to scandal and opinion, and the envy of lesser men. Tony ‘didn’t know which he resented most – Rupert’s habitual contempt, his ability to sleep anywhere, his effortless acquisition of women …’ There’s also the capacity Rupert shares with a goodish number of other characters in these novels to swallow ...”

“... traditional conservative support could no longer be counted on. He set a tremendous trap for Jim Wright, the machine-made Texan Democratic Speaker, and sprang the trap with a tremendous clang. (Oddly enough, Wright’s indiscretion concerned a book he had written, the royalties of which were said to be creatively ...”

“... elections was not a success. Accusing the Tories of having no policies didn’t work either. ‘Tony Blair says it’s all style and no substance,’ Cameron told the Conservative party conference last year. ‘In fact he wrote me a letter about it. Dear Kettle, You’re black. Signed Pot.’ On issues ranging from civil liberties to aviation, Labour has ...”