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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sixty. A few passers-by watch the arrival of the celebrities, of which there seem to be only two, Michael Yorke and Michael Caine (who later slags off the film). The audience is not star-studded either and heavily sprinkled with those freaks, autograph-hunters and emotional cripples who haunt the stage-doors of American ...”

“... expected to know about. Who is Mary McCarthy writing for? Either the decidedly elderly or the very young might respond: the first because they can remember what she is talking about, if they knew those sections of American life; the second because it is a thrill to hear the sacred monster reminisce. The inbetweens can only remember with nostalgia her novels ...”

“... eyesight, though her hand was still steady, without any trembling.It was far from usual for young men like Van Dyck to express admiration for blind, elderly women. Yet the meeting made a deep impression on him. Not only is this the longest description of a person or a painting to be found in the sketchbook he kept during his Italian years, it is also ...”

“... death, and is set in the present, when Cuba and Nicaragua fill the dreams of the European young. Some of the European young: perhaps Böll was not entirely up-to-date with the fading popularity of radical dreams. But the time here really stretches back to 1945. It is a whole post-war Germany that is being ...”

“... to whom the horses were to be sold, and who owns much of the land and a lot of action in Cuba; his young American mistress Amelia Brown, a woman all set to get into more and more trouble; Victor Fuentes, Boudreaux’s agent, a man who looks like (and is) a rebel sympathiser biding his time; the local police chief and his spy; an American sailor who was blown ...”

“... wore pink triangles. I was present when Christopher Isherwood tried to make this point to a young Jewish movie producer. ‘After all,’ said Isherwood, ‘Hitler killed six hundred thousand homosexuals.’ The young man was not impressed. ‘But Hitler killed six million Jews,’ he said sternly. ‘What are ...”