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“... war-demolished houses had been.Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from KensingtonOn​ the opening page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are ...”

“... This​ is a dry and dutiful book which reads like a ghost story. The person being haunted is David Cameron. Theresa May grew up in a Cotswolds village called Church Enstone, where her father was vicar for much of the 1960s. The vicarage is within five miles of what became Cameron’s constituency home when he was MP for Witney and is roughly the same distance from what is now Soho Farmhouse, a members’ club, a little piece of the metropolis that is a haven for the Chipping Norton set ...”

“... For three years​ David Blunkett, then the Labour home secretary, had an affair with Kimberly Fortier, publisher of the Spectator. The affair came to an end in the summer of 2004. A few weeks later, on Friday 13 August, Andy Coulson, editor of the News of the World, showed up at Blunkett’s office in Sheffield to ask whether he was having an affair with a married woman ...”

“... dreadlocks, Stanic of Croatia turned albino after (or was it before?) facing the Romanians. Craig Burley did the same before lining up against Morocco. There were ginger-haired Africans, scarlet-topped Asians, a Chilean who had tried for who-knew-what hue-change then bottled out, or so it seemed. Grisliest of all, perhaps, there was the spectacle ...”

“... of poetry. Martianism had nothing to do with Mars, everything to do with home, the place where Craig Raine (like Murray or Dunn) feels richest. Surely Martianism comes from the ‘Ithaca’ section of Ulysses, the quintessence of home seen from abroad. Home can be a bit smug, though; and sometimes constricting. The poetic celebrants of home at the moment ...”

“... blue pencil hurt only to heal. The LRB’s taste for poetry is a sure sign of its ear for prose. Craig Raine is represented in this selection by a poem of his own and another by David Lodge, who parodies the Martian approach so successfully that you wonder if it has quite enough to it. Blake Morrison’s ‘Xerox’ is a ...”

“... and summer. I can rhyme them off: Noss and Hermaness, Sula Sgeir, Stac Li and Stac an Armin, Ailsa Craig. These ones are ancient. There are also newish ones on the Aberdeenshire mainland at Troup Head, and on Westray in Orkney. There’s only one colony in England, at Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire. Silent and elegant at sea, gannets make a racket in their ...”

“... Glasgow. I posted a photograph of it on Twitter and in less than an hour received a message from Craig Wallace, curator of the Sogo Arts Gallery and an experienced model maker. Soon he had the Bonhomme Richard in his care. The first step, he said, would be to clean it with water and a small paintbrush. Then he’d treat the wood with linseed oil. He started ...”

“... was the founding editor of the cultural magazine Scottish International; and the Scots Fanonites Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull would apply Fanon’s insights about an internalised sense of inferiority to Scotland’s cravenly sub-metropolitan lettered classes (I was among those named and shamed).The unbending realities of first past the post politics ...”

“... It is 15 years since she died, and memories of her are not as sharp as they were. Which makes Craig Brown’s enterprise not only a marvellous freak of literature but a matchless summoner of our yesterdays. It is a collage, montage or bricolage of glittery bits culled from two hundred biographies, authorised and unauthorised, written by cashiered gossip ...”

“... Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act and Seize the Fire, Craig Raine’s ‘1953’), or, pre-empting Muldoon, the opera libretto all in verse that is Raine’s The Electrification of the Soviet Union – a Pasternak adaptation set to music by Nigel Osborne. There is a certain admirable posturing about all this, a ...”

“... littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie. In the 1980s, the American poet David Antin charged that ‘anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for undergraduates to swear off Evian, in the hope that tap-water drinkers could afford unabridged books rather than hackneyed ...”

“... from a loose identification with the Workers’ Party to becoming a behind-the-scenes adviser to David Trimble in his brave attempt to bring Unionism to the middle ground of power-sharing with a domesticated Sinn Féin. Bew is allegedly the originator of the pithy identification of Trimble’s desired power base as ‘the Prod in the garden centre’; the ...”

“... Jean Renoir was admired by his followers and contemporaries for the relaxed feel of his films. He himself loved the improvisatory quality of the Commedia dell’Arte, which he saw as a struggle between ‘the tendency toward exterior realism and that toward interior realism’, and wrote that what he considered to be ‘the ultimate in cinema as in theatre’ was ‘a style and dialogue that sometimes borders on the burlesque ...”

“... Clyde in the early 20th century was in large part its creation. In When the Clyde Ran Red, Maggie Craig quotes an article published in the Times just after the 1922 election which suspiciously lists some of the things organised by the ILP: ‘Socialist study circles, socialist economics classes, socialist music festivals, socialist athletics ...”