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“... The acrimony in Michael Hofmann’s book is that of a son towards his father. Like a family photograph album, the sequence ‘My Father’s House’ records the son’s growth from childhood to manhood, and the father’s from early to late middle age: each poem denotes some new phase, and usually low point, in the relationship ...”

“... and fascinating claim, with radical implications for the historiography of the period. Michael Thompson has had something of the same intuition about Victorian society, and it is one of several themes in his new book which makes this much more than the undergraduate or A-level toolkit which it might appear to be. We know a great deal about the ...”

“... he seems to feel that nothing less than the whole life of his hero, the alcoholic wanderer Michael Thorn, will do, and nothing less than the full monty of a novel. This is a great pity, generally, where modern British writing is concerned, and, specifically, for Rolling, which for the first fifty pages (a love affair with a schoolboy in Glasgow), or ...”

“... The continuing American blindness to Vietnam itself, in this and many other instances, notably Michael Cimino’s film The Deer Hunter (1978), can be astonishing, but the myth also shows some genuine self-understanding. Apocalypse Now, in particular, is full of the sense that Americans exported whole chunks of their culture to Vietnam and discovered its ...”

“... saw him standing at the window of his flat ...’ An elderly woman leaving a swimming-pool makes a young woman’s gesture of goodbye:   Her arm rose with bewitching ease. It was as if she were playfully tossing a brightly coloured ball to her lover ... The instant she turned, smiled and waved ... she was unaware of her age. The essence of her ...”

“... she took the children to an uncle who was shortly to open up a thousand acres of land in the west. Young Facey, Bert as he was known, was six years old. From then on it was a life of labour for him. He never went to school. A Fortunate Life is that rare thing, an account of labour, of arduous physical work. Generally, those who are able to write about work as ...”

“... letters – the first in any language – supply this material discreetly and clearly. Here is a young Russian, 24 years old when he meets a woman, also Russian, just under three years younger than he is, in Berlin. His father, a liberal politician in exile, has been murdered by right-wing extremists. She is Jewish, and the Germany around them is growing ...”

“... at 40 Grosvenor Road, Westminster, next door to Sidney and Beatrice Webb. With his elder brother Michael, Anthony went to the local school (Westminster), and he grew up thinking that he might work locally too, just like his dad. Lady Stansgate gives another insight on the boys’ upbringing: ‘They used to pretend they were workmen called Bill and Jim ...”

“... men involved, who are now dead (I am about to do so), but the man described in my book as the ‘young planter’ is still alive, and I will not name him. Within four hours of the explosions on 21 November five Irishmen – Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, Billy Power and Johnny Walker – were arrested at Heysham in Lancashire as they got off a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a familiar vision of the American South – magnolias, cotton, red dust and tumbledown shacks. A young girl picking flowers stumbles on the body of a lynched man. An old black lady wanders into a segregated church and is bustled away by the congregation, who project onto her dazed, innocent face all their own mean and multiple fears. Poor blacks move ...”

“... has escalated into triple murder: a policeman blown away because he wouldn’t be bribed, a young man and a young woman swiftly shot because they drove by and saw the dead policeman. ‘Circumstances ... Beyond the, uh, acts of God, force majeure.’ And then later he says twice, rather solemnly: ‘Blood has been ...”

“... the chance to do his work, to smuggle a sense of shape into a recalcitrant history. Of course the young Yuri, riding through Moscow in a sleigh, sees ‘the same things that had caught Lara’s eye not long before’, even though he hasn’t met her yet. That’s how twinned destinies work. And when it turns out that the man (a voluptuous lawyer) who seduced ...”

“... Story of a Life, which, given that it’s an account of the first thirty years of the life of a young male, seems worthy of note. Perhaps it is this virginal or puritanical aspect of Paustovsky that is communism’s gift. In the absence of the anti-bourgeois construct ‘free love’ – the transaction uncomplicated as ‘a glass of water’ (Alexandra ...”

“... were warm, gentle, determined people, unlikely parents of a man who had been convicted of shooting Michael Gregsten dead in a lay-by off the A6, raping his girlfriend Valerie Storie and then shooting her, leaving her for dead before driving off in the couple’s car. Among the guests at the wake were Jean Justice, who told me he was a (rather elderly) law ...”