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“... let you take a swing. You watched his face as your shrivelled rock-hard Conker blew his prize into white chips across the playground. When he cried, you’d tell him – ‘Don’t Blub, Little Man.’ But then you’d meet a senior whose Conker looked strange and transparent. He had hollowed out the middle and filled it full of glue which hardened into ...”

“... out a verdict reached after calm deliberation by a jury of you honest citizens black folk and white, right there in the Fourteenth Amendment in black and white, the jury that’s the bulwark and cornerstone of American justice like you don’t see in these dictator atheist countries. And it’s not just the characters ...”

“... into certain conventions of lyrical prose: ‘At night, from the stair window, the field was a white paradise of loneliness, and a starlit wind made the glass shake like loose, black water and the ice snore on the sill.’ ‘Raindrops, highlighted, were sliding in slant ocelli across the windowpane.’ The ocelli and the alliteration, like the snoring ice ...”

“... Rainey, the antihero-cum-hero of London and the South-East (‘his flabby ashen face, his round white shoulders, his downy tits’), sells space in magazines that don’t exist to guileless foreign firms (his work has an almost patriotic dimension); gets bladdered in the pub on the way home, while entertaining fantasies of Michaela the barmaid; smokes ...”

“... of show-business, it is unlikely that any overweight person will ever again be elected to the White House. A necessary (if not sufficient) condition for electoral success nowadays is that one should ‘come over well’ on television. And fat people, by and large and on the average, do not. Mr Cockerell’s absorbing book might, at first, be seen as a ...”

“... are always somewhere intact’), and a scream and a poem within the poem, a shaking hand and a white page. In the second poem Paterson offers a convenient and very funny picture of himself at work: The new poem is coming along like a dream: this is the big one, the one that will finally consolidate everything. It is the usual, but different: a series of ...”

“... to an English-language bookshop – there’s even one at the railway station – to buy a copy of Michael Crichton’s new novel, Next (HarperCollins, £17.99). But why go to the trouble of spending the whole of Wednesday morning buying a book, when I could just download it now, on Tuesday evening? Diesel eBooks were offering Next in three formats: I plumped ...”

“... leave their small Caribbean island for Britain in the 1950s, when prospects were cheery. The white folks of the West had never had it so good: too good, or so their masters told them, to settle at menial labours. Since the publication of her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, in 1959, Paule Marshall has been weaving a delicate history of the ...”

“... to rehouse all these homeless people. So there was work in our town. The oldest men, men with white beards, men you would have called on at most to fix your stove in winter, now clambered up and down scaffolding poles. They were like bearded weasels. I too found work. I had a notebook, and wrote down metres and centimetres and kept a tally of ...”

“... least about moderation – is at an end. The polls, which a scant month or so ago were giving the White House to Ross Perot, are now awarding it to ‘The New Covenant’ (a slogan so treacly in its unction that it died a-borning and is never, ever mentioned even for satirical purposes. Its companion exhortation, ‘Putting People First’, is so vacuous that ...”

“... vast crowds of hideous people thronging the streets and bus queues.’ There’s an old-fashioned, white-gloved, Bowes-Lyon kind of superiority to all this, and reading Gielgud’s letters makes you realise how theatrical the business of class often is in this country. It is of course perfectly English to hate people at bus stops, but also English to ...”

“... Of all the many tributes to Michael Foot it was David Cameron who hit the nail on the head. He was, Cameron said, ‘almost the last link to a more heroic age in politics’. In appearance, and demeanour, Foot resembled an Old Testament prophet. An impression which, in later life, his shock of white hair, the passion of his delivery and the magnificence of his rhetoric served only to enhance ...”

“... the weather been hazier, more care might have been taken and the collision avoided. In that case, Michael Davie suggests, it’s likely that no one would ever have known how close to disaster they’d been: ‘not all near-misses by aircraft are reported now; and the Ice Patrol wonder how many near-collisions by ships were reported then.’ At the inquiries ...”

“... He’s an Irish-American pol of an earlier vintage and relatively harmless. He goes down well with white blue-collar voters and African-Americans. But Iowa and New Hampshire have wounded him badly and I wonder if he can now win in South Carolina, where he was heavily favoured. I like Amy Klobuchar, the senator from Minnesota, best of all. She clearly won the ...”

“... jogging, praising, claiming – even if he only has someone saying: ‘I am drinking a dry white wine’ – is finally cringing, odious and unbelievable. ‘My life, on the other hand, has been a series of border violations’; ‘Women are drawn to his heat; dogs rub against his legs’; ‘In her company, his manhood still soars, like Gothic ...”