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“... men’s concern for athletics, flute-playing and good times. On the iron grips of shields red-brown spiders spin their webs; rust subdues sharp spears and double-edged swords. There is no noise of bronze trumpets, and sleep – honey for the mind – still soothes the heart at dawn: it is not pillaged from men’s eyelids. The streets are laden with ...”

“... her cult is teeming with new acolytes. Christina Ricci just played her in an adaptation of Therese Anne Fowler’s Z (costumes were the real stars there, especially Ricci’s big brown merkin). Jennifer Lawrence has been linked to an upcoming biopic, as has Scarlett Johansson. Unusual biopics, of course, since they contend ...”

“... late Elizabethan doublet with an unusual semi-transparent lace collar. He has fashionably shortish brown hair, a fairly high forehead, bags under his eyes as if he hasn’t been sleeping well lately, and a lightweight, almost fluffy beard and moustache. The top right-hand corner of the painting gives a date – 1603, perfectly consonant with the clothes, the ...”

“... of reproach and supermarkets are running out of Argentinian beef. The Agriculture Minister, Nick Brown, is accused of doing too much and doing too little. The questions surrounding the foot and mouth epidemic – where will it all end? how did it all start? – might be understood to accord with anxiety about every aspect of British agriculture today. The ...”

“... in from Ireland, and their pleasures taken among forests of borage, heifer clarts and becks where brown trout swim through watermint. But MacSweeney isn’t writing a bucolic memoir. Pearl has a cleft palate and, partly as a consequence, is illiterate. Stranded at the beginning of the alphabet, she can only vocalise ‘a-a-a-a-a-a’. The seam of her damaged ...”

“... of river boundaries, and on knowledge gained from watching the equestrian activities of Princess Anne. This last source is tapped by Professor R.A. Brown in a provocative paper on the social status of the Norman knight, calling for sympathy with the ‘sheer love of war’ which can be found in the governing classes of the ...”

“... toilets, into a new high-security facility that had been built by the military contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root, the company to which Dick Cheney had financial ties. We toured the prison, which was called Camp 5, modelled on a maximum-security state prison in rural Indiana. It was shiny and high-tech, and housed the most dangerous inmates – although the ...”

“... environment. They are disturbed by the ghost-crowded aura of the castle (a childhood home of Anne Boleyn) and rush towards the wide-open spaces of the estate. The bad writing of this section may be a piece of cleverness I don’t quite get. Here are the girls on the look-out for a good picnic spot: they began to excitedly descend the slight brae towards ...”

“... and intellectual pre-eminence. By the end of the 19th century the physiologist Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard was injecting himself with extracts of dog and guinea-pig testicles to restore his youth. (It failed.) In popular culture the scientist’s elixir was transformed into ‘monkey glands’, which had a long, if much satirised, vogue, still extant in ...”

“... too, were precisely of the period: Godard and Resnais, the Marat/Sade, Genet, Pavese, Norman O. Brown and Happenings. In this posthumous collection written four decades later, the literary pieces have hardly changed, the writers she applauds are still largely European, though of the past rather than the present, and her wholehearted admiration for the work ...”

“... mind them.’Feeney balances this material against evasion and omission – the John McGahern and Anne Enright school of hiding trauma in narrative cracks. As You Were is haunted by the abuses of women in recent Irish history. Between 1925 and 1961 a maternity home for unmarried mothers and their children operated in Tuam, a large town in Galway, the county ...”

“... finds himself recounting, in the first person, Hardy’s memory of watching the hanging of Martha Brown at Dorchester when he was an adolescent. Cross-examination reveals that he does indeed have all of Hardy’s consciousness in his head, and that he was born exactly a hundred years after Hardy, to the very minute. Sharon thinks all this will be good for ...”

“... knowing herself to be a witness to a monstrous piece of history (‘I was in the same barracks as Anne Frank. Of course, I didn’t know who she was then. There were just some Dutch girls. They cried all the time.’) Watching the VJ Day commemorations brought it back. ‘I saw those old men, Japanese prisoners of war, and I thought: you shouldn’t ...”

“... are public replies, their tone is often one of public rebuke. In a letter to Plath’s biographer Anne Stevenson, Hughes wrote: ‘She never did anything that I held against her. The only thing that I found hard to understand was her sudden discovery of our bad moments (“;Event”, “Rabbit Catcher”) as subjects for poems.’ He now repays Plath in ...”

“... of SIS, and – most of all – the uniforms of East German dinginess: the white socks and brown shoes that ‘Smith’ wears, the ‘hand-me-down Marlene’ clothes worn by ‘Michaela’, the cheap synthetic track-suits of the former Stasi officers. It comes as no surprise that when Markus Wolf strolls into these pages he is tall and ...”