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“... and savage’) to certain terms bandied about today: ‘terrorist’, ‘bomber’. Brian Friel, another of the ‘Field Day’ directors, does something similar in his play, Translations, which isn’t only about the act of translating place-names from Irish to English, but also ‘translates’ a typical British battalion in the Belfast or ...”

“... to a woman who pursues men in a spirit of adventure, because she is afraid of them. Down from the Hill is another novel about discontented middle-aged reminiscence. The narrator of the first section is a 17-year-old factory worker from Nottingham describing a long bicycle ride through the Midlands, 250 miles, stopping at a Youth Hostel and a bed-and-breakfast ...”

“... for balance, in good BBC style. And grass gets into just about everything in The Archers: even Brian Aldridge’s current infidelity was facilitated by some entrepreneurial agricultural activity in Hungary. The grass family, Poaceae, is one of the relatively few genuinely cosmopolitan families of plants. Grasses can be found from Alaska to Antarctica, from ...”

“... hard to dispel a suspicion that were she one more Rock Bloke (a Peter Gabriel, Roger Waters or Brian Pern), critics would be far less kind to her mistakes. Imagine a reclusive Rock Bloke foisting on his impatient public the following: long waits for concept albums full of ‘great mates’ from the 1970s; songs about Bigfoot and snowmen and Stephen Fry ...”

“... History of My Private Life, in which he wrote up the diaries he had kept since he was 13. Brian Robins, the editor of this meticulously scholarly volume (the footnotes alone comprise a small musical encyclopedia), has selected in favour of the musical content of the journals. Still, this book must be one of the fullest records in print of daily life ...”

“... a time had been Sinatra’s agent, or one of them, took me to dinner at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. Seymour was showbiz and liked to make a flash impression. After dinner he made me drink a sambuca with a coffee bean in it. He told me this was what classy guys drink. I asked him if Sinatra was Mob. Without missing a beat, Seymour laughed and said: ‘Are ...”

“... Beardsley’s unfinished literary tour de force, published in expurgated form as ‘Under the Hill’ in the Savoy and in full after his death, presents an extraordinary catalogue of bizarre practices. Its anti-hero, transposed from the Middle Ages to the 18th century as a chevalier or an abbé, enters a grotto deep within the Venusburg, the mons veneris ...”

“... States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day in July’ – a covert imputation and ...”

“... influence on Australian history was perhaps even greater than that of their British equivalents, Hill, Thompson, Hobsbawm and Rudé, since they were there at the beginning and hence in a position to shape the discipline along lines that codified the radical nationalist interpretation of Australian history. Even in his own lifetime, Bill Somerville’s hopes ...”

“... for the spread of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles. I thought of the fields that had passed underfoot, all the way back to Essex, through Dumfriesshire, Northumberland or Sussex. Later I would ...”

“... hubby his nuptial rites after disclosures at the wedding reception of past naughtinesses. There is Brian Everthorpe, a Nice Work refugee, still trying to flog his Riviera sunbeds, and this time equipped with mousy wife and brand-new video camera (the showing of the subsequent holiday home-movie at an end-of-tour reception is, however, the novel’s comic ...”

“... thesis: ‘Though I personally would be satisfied to spend the whole of eternity gazing at a blue hill or a butterfly, I would feel the poorer if I accepted the idea of there not existing still more vivid means of knowing butterflies and hills.’The day is visible somehow in these interviews, slanting down through tall windows, and I found myself thinking ...”

“... in his dead uncle’s house, thinking: ‘Tomorrow he’d lie in the earth on the top of Killeelan Hill. A man is born. He dies. Where he himself stood now on the path between these two points could not be known … He must be already well out past halfway.’The second letter in this book is from 1957, when McGahern was working as a teacher in Dublin. ‘I ...”

“... to the parklands once tended by the bucolic poet Chris Torrance), then transplanted to Notting Hill (crucible of all the counter-culture follies he was later to deride). An instinctive autodidact, Home was soon weeviling through bookstall fodder, from skins and sorts and bikers to the half-forgotten magi of the Gothic, to Black Mask, Up Against the Wall ...”

“... At the time of the Wessex computer scandal, he said, Mrs Currie’s husband Ray and his brother Brian were senior executives at Arthur Andersen. Mrs Currie was incensed by this reference, and complained of misuse of Parliamentary privilege. When I asked her whether the Secretary of State had given a misleading reply very much to the advantage of Arthur ...”