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“... exactly how unfinished, how much flushing, was moot. Many opposed ministers making the sign of the cross – a popish superstition – while condoning infant baptism. But Anabaptists, who were also puritans, found the entire ritual of baptism obnoxious. The historian Patrick Collinson’s definition of puritans as ‘the hotter sort of Protestants’ was ...”

“... as he chose to do when he created Wizard of the Crow in Gikuyu before rewriting it in English. Tim Parks has vehemently attacked global literature as a monstrous birth of publishing corporatism, as writers in the world beyond the Anglosphere keep a weather eye on translatability into the huge English reading market: ‘At the moment we are passing towards ...”

“... now suddenly he can heal, all by himself; he cures the cripple Edward, but dies in the process. Tim takes over his father’s circus act until his grandparents die too, and he inherits their Wiltshire farmhouse, where he lives alone at the end of the novel. He no longer reads his English books, not because he doubts their value, but because he has already ...”

“... use of the word hoor with a range of examples from the writings of Patrick Kavanagh, Brian Friel, Tim Pat Coogan, Oliver St John Gogarty, Neil Jordan and Hugh Leonard. It’s a method that seems to be at once academically sound and, for those committed to a long weekend in England and Wales carrying only one bag and one book, perfect for a bit of one-way ...”

“... Meloni, and Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis. Nationalism’s transnationalism isn’t new but cross-border connections have been supercharged in the digital age. NatCon is a global franchise: as well as official conferences in Florida, Brussels, Washington DC and elsewhere, there have been aligned gatherings in Brazil and Mexico. For many on the ...”

“... story, they have no narrative as such and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to matching. The problem, as Hamilton concedes in ...”

“... to ‘ram-raiders and rioters’ for a promotional pyramid in the window of Waterstones, Charing Cross Road. There is a very peculiar generosity in sponsoring writers who consistently jeer at the weary political pretensions of the hand that feeds them – and who blasphemously reverse the captions on side-by-side portraits of Mickey Mouse and Leon ...”

“... into novels – Penelope Fitzgerald, Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Beryl Bainbridge, William Trevor, Tim Parks among others – to limber up. Then she rolled up her sleeves and having extracted the technical nuts and bolts (beginning, middle, end; main and subsidiary plot and characters), wrote Naim Attallah’s novel in six weeks. Middle-aged, suave, married ...”

“... eyes’. Sightings were reported in (among many other places) a Lyons tea shop near King’s Cross, an Italian café in Paddington and a compartment in a Bognor Regis to London train.The alarming fact was that hundreds of neat, respectable-seeming middle-aged men in mackintoshes and horn-rimmed specs looked exactly like Reginald Christie. Eventually a ...”

“... with issues or institutions or genres, and can give in each entry only a very selective array of cross-references, this is one case where a thematic index would increase companionability. Not that reading the book right through is unrewarding. Another reservation aboout the framing of the Companion, which may have to do with constraints of space but may ...”

“... source of so many soldiers of fortune – and within the International Committee of the Red Cross about PMCs. He passes quickly over the two signal mercenary moments of recent times, neither of them involving Blackwater. One was the hiring by the Sierra Leone government of the South African PMC Executive Outcomes to defeat rebels in 1995 (three years ...”

“... The Arabian Nights is a pre-eminent example of the travelling text, an extraordinary case of cross-fertilisation, retelling, grafting and borrowing, imitation and dissemination back and forth between Persia, India, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt and Europe over several centuries. Narrative sequences of this sort – interlaced within the frame of a ransom tale ...”

“... of the Primrose Hill Community Library on Sharpleshall Street is a list of recently dead authors. Tim Heald, Jenny Diski, A.A. Gill. Periodically a newly dead name is added until a fresh list is posted. It’s hard not to see oneself there, with one day someone else passing and glancing at it as heedlessly as I do. I’m also in another window as ‘local ...”

“... lottery directors’ annual salaries are restricted to less than £ 100,000. The annual salary of Tim Holley, chief executive of the British lottery company, Camelot, is £443,367. All the main lottery contracts go to the five companies which own all the shares in Camelot. All this is ‘regulated’ by Oflot, who, in a trip to the US, travelled in a plane ...”

“... returned by the Labour Party. According to the then parliamentary commissioner for standards, Tim Smith, a Conservative minister, received payments of between £18,000 and £25,000 from al-Fayed for lobbying services, including the tabling of parliamentary questions. He later resigned his seat. In general, however, it’s difficult to find cases in which ...”