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“... A couple of years ago there was one of those Barry Humphries TV specials in which the Australian entertainer teases an audience of notables to the edge of humiliation. The guests attend to the act warily, poised between the pleasure of being official celebrities and the fear of being publicly ridiculed. After tormenting various patsies in a way that must have made them wish there was an RSPCA for humans, Dame Edna (for it was she) suddenly spotted Melvyn Bragg ...”

“... A tear caught in a mussel shell turns to pearl, the Ancients believed. Barry MacSweeney’s The Book of Demons begins among the living with ‘Pearl’, a 22-poem sequence evoking a childhood love between the poet-persona and his sweetheart, the daughter of a poverty-stricken smallholding family from the ‘rain-soaked’ ‘raw-bone’ laws – the high moors around Allen-heads in Northumberland ...”

“... a place so small it’s hard to find on any map. ‘Would Kilclooney mean church field?’ I ask Barry as we sit in the bar in the heel of the day. ‘It would, Tomás,’ he says, then instantly produces etymologies and all sorts of words in Irish – way beyond the dozen I vaguely know, and can never pronounce right. ...”

“... Like a lonely child’s lair, really.’ There is the limp eulogy which his brother gives: ‘Now, Barry lived life to the full … he was spoiled rotten. And he continued to spoil himself rotten, I think it’s fair to say.’ Christine, her father’s sister, tells her that when her own father died she ran all the way back to the house from the hospital ...”

“... Council. Simon has put his name forward for election as a councillor, to replace the popular Barry Fairbrother, whose sudden death has created the ‘casual vacancy’ of the title. The technical means of delivering the poisonous message is an ‘SQL injection’, something mentioned to Andrew’s computing class by a young supply teacher who was trying ...”

“... half of the 20th century. The plan (and many of the cottages) was the work of Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, who remained closely involved with the area. When George Bernard Shaw, who lived in the nearby village of Ayot St Lawrence, needed a garage, he asked Parker (his revolving writing hut was Shaw’s own work).Stevenage and Hemel Hempstead followed ...”

“... the about-to-be-privatised Naval dockyard at Rosyth, the oil-rigs under repair between Dundee and Barry which we the people no longer own even 51 per cent of since Lawson sold the family silver. Near Arbroath the hillocky golf links and sandstone skerries haven’t changed but a long brick wall, blank for decades, now flaunts a carefully-painted white ...”

“... If Barry Cunliffe’s large and magnificent new book has a guiding motto, it is a famous sentence by Fernand Braudel about the Mediterranean, which Cunliffe applies to the whole continent and repeats several times in these pages: ‘Our sea was from the very dawn of its prehistory a witness to those imbalances productive of change which would set the rhythm of its entire life ...”

“... from the moment it left Anchorage, KAL 007 strayed northwards off its proper path. It was 365 miles off-course when it was shot down: further than any other plane had strayed in the history of civil aviation. Somehow, none of the waypoints were warned of this deviation. Somehow, no one on board noticed. Somehow, before he set off from Anchorage, the ...”

“... a documentary about a vast region without a single National Geographic banality concerning square miles, population figures or the value of timber and fur exports. The programme was the first of a projected trilogy; the second was to be about Newfoundland. Gould went there in 1968, fully aware of its Viking history, ‘in search of characters for a ...”

“... fully explored, however, the Arctic remains at least partly a world of fantasy. In Arctic Dreams Barry Lopez writes at length of the Arctic as it is now seen by scientists. Lopez is a professional writer with a near-professional grasp of the natural sciences and anthropology: his book is rich in fact, perhaps the best survey of the Arctic environment ever ...”

“... hours from NY. Of course, it could be argued that the Aussies bring it on themselves, with their Barry McKenzies, their Ian Chappells, their self-parodying Foster ads, and so on. And there is the accent: for some reason more readily mimickable than any of our own regional twangs. Theories about the Australian accent are just as snooty as theories about ...”

“... fall short; what it does, however, is show up the inadequacies of the original. Chandler may be miles away from Miss Marple and her cottage, and he made claims to a kind of realism and moral toughness in his work. But a parody shows up clearly that what you get in Chandler is only another fantasy: one to do with money, dream girls, cars and power, with the ...”

“... of how tight things had got. After several months of this the Klan finally attacked, and my friend Barry Higgs (who later edited the ANC paper Sechaba from East Berlin) and I had the dubious pleasure of seeing them off. It has to be said that there is no pleasure quite like watching a carload of armed men wearing stockings over their heads drive angrily away ...”

“... without blankets and ‘made my bed of rich, spicy boughs, elastic and warm’. In a cleft three miles back from the brow of El Capitan, ‘I lay down and thought of the time when the groove in which I rested was being ground away at the bottom of a vast ice-sheet that flowed over all the Sierra like a slow wind.’ He carried little but his notebook tied to ...”