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“... lines broken and indented to no obvious purpose. Verse like Philip Gross’s is the norm in Britain today and has been since the Movement: the poem as goods train, trundling a series of shackled-together images behind the engine of its main theme. Medbh McGuckian, occasionally linked with the Martians but from a different almost French Symbolist ...”

“... staggering up Grafton Street, their T-shirts clinging to them with alcopops and spilled Sambuca. Britain’s news-stands are heaving with magazines devoted to the rough magic of being a bloke. On first sight you think they are what my friends used to call scud mags; the girls who adorn the covers – legs wide, breasts atumble, nipples fit for pegging a ...”

“... of Baby (1913) by Frederic Truby King, a New Zealand-born doctor, was reprinted several times in Britain after he visited the country in 1917. He worried about the ‘injudicious handling’ of the ‘babies of the Empire’; good habits, he said, came from the strict allowance of mother’s milk, ‘the only perfect food – the baby’s ...”

“... TV shows, could only conclude that a sharp dislike of Scots and Scotland is spreading across South Britain. The reports suggest a bout of Scotophobia without parallel since the violently anti-Scottish mood of the English mob in Lord Bute’s day. The ignorance and nastiness of some of this journalism have been startling. The Daily Telegraph wrote that Scotland ...”

“... depended to a considerable extent on its outcome, for Scotland’s future evidently lay with a Britain and an Empire whose ‘civic discourse’ would be conducted in a suitably metropolitan tongue. In a world in which ‘scotticisms’ condemned their users to the fringes of power and influence, ‘English’ could claim to be nothing less than one of ...”

“... grace, the irreplaceable flower of the nation’s youth; and they blamed the post-war decline of Britain on their absence. The survivors – guilty, perhaps, simply of having survived – were left to bear the burden of a disappointing and mediocre peace. Brittain became a leading spokeswoman for this national myth. What substance did it ...”

“... Union had been based. Ireland received the same franchise and other reforms as the rest of Britain, and even, by the 1900s, a land settlement that effectively removed the main 19th-century agrarian grievances. Yet Catholic Nationalist demands continually ran ahead, and so the Ulster Protestant middle and working classes found themselves locked with ...”

“... book shop, and that remained the case until the 1980s, when all-party legislation promoted by Ian Gilmour permitted their owners to make the shops look more or less civilised. That legislation, and the establishment of the ‘good causes’ National Lottery in 1993, anticipated the moral neutrality of the Gambling Review Report. Moral neutrality, of ...”

“... of ideas Bennett would never have attempted. There’s a clue in the title. The phrase occurs in Ian Colvin’s ‘Social Survey of the World To-Day’, a chapter in the eighth and final volume of a Universal History of the World first published in 1927. ‘Thus, whereas in China there was an adult working male population of, say, 100 millions, in the United ...”

“... reforms. Such measures didn’t go much beyond the reforms brought in by the New Liberalism in Britain before the First World War, but for Mises they were ‘Bolshevism’, and would ‘lead Vienna to starvation and terror within a few days’. ‘Plundering hordes would take to the streets,’ he warned, ‘and a second bloodbath would destroy what was ...”

“... and the British took pride in. Here’s a crude way of putting it: the measure of character, in Britain, was your capacity to put up with something; in America, it was your ability to sort it out. And yet I can’t help feeling, as a naturalised Brit who spent about a third of his childhood in England, that this country has changed – and that what’s ...”

“... in the Soviet Union they get drunk on vodka; in France they get drunk on wine made from grapes; in Britain lager louts get drunk on lager. Such an international phenomenon, taking up so much time for so many people in so many countries, was hardly likely to escape the attention of the likes of Paul Antze (contributor to Constructive Drinking), who says his ...”

“... Muslim Arab majority, I can instinctively understand both the pressures that produce people like Ian Paisley (in my case, my Lebanese Protestant relations who identified with the Phalanges Libanaises, the Jumayyil family’s proto-fascist party) and the tormented and vulnerable ‘conscience of Ulster Protestants’, a real community which is ‘a people ...”

“... death in the Birmingham pub bombing gives ballast to Coe’s seriocomic survey of 1970s Britain. Benjamin, a would-be writer, is a dreamy, passive boy who feels ‘destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs’. His schoolfriends – Philip, a conscientious plodder; Doug, a worldly left-wing wit; Harding, an anarchic practical ...”

“... worry, the menfolk are keeping Arlene right. Challenging David Davis to ‘stand up to the EU’, Ian Paisley Jr declared in the House of Commons that ‘It’s about time the government displayed a no surrender attitude – stand up to them, man!’ Sammy Wilson, the DUP member for East Antrim, agreed and spoke of taking the gloves off in the fight with the ...”