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“... the beginning, don’t understand the end.’ In Part II, on the morphology of case, Andrew Spencer considers (among other things) Australian languages in which cases not only correspond to verb-categories such as tense or the syntactical status of the clause, but are themselves given the morphology of verbs. At this point the reader realises ...”

“... seemed to understand that stories have their own needs and immutable trajectories. Diana told Andrew Morton in Diana: Her True Story that she would never be queen. In 1992 I reviewed the Morton book for this paper and mocked her prediction: ‘The premonition is never quite explained. Does she think that death is beckoning, or divorce, or is she planning ...”

“... had discovered inoperable cancer. The surgeon told his companion, Monica Jones, who, according to Andrew Motion’s biography of Larkin, decided to keep the news to herself. She was worried about the effect of a terminal diagnosis on a man who had often expressed his terror of dying. So Larkin’s doctors kept up a cheerful front and told him that they ...”

“... causing him to worry about a ‘poverty of the imagination’. Lennon reveals all of this in slow motion, and his biography is a life-map that misses very few twists in the road, showing us how Mailer went about surviving the kind of reputation that would be retailed in gossip columns and joked about on in-flight movies for sixty years. After I stepped off ...”

“... inhabitants of that great city.’ My first day at St Winnin’s RC comes back to me in slow motion, coloured yellow and brown. It was, and is, more frightening than romantic, and I cried all the way to the school gate. Things had begun to take off with my visit to the high flats at Irvine. I suddenly knew more about the world, and saw our black and ...”

“... what we know about the ways of being alive and what we hear about the ways of being dead’, as Andrew O’Hagan wrote in a different context, seem ideally suited to a writer like Ondaatje, who is happy to operate on the borders of realism. The meticulous detail doesn’t compensate for shortcomings in the more basic elements of a fiction, however. While ...”

“... singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may easily find himself defeated. He is not even ...”

“... chief of defence staff, Sir Nicholas Houghton. Interviewed on 8 November, he confided to a purring Andrew Marr that the army was deeply vexed by Corbyn’s unilateralism, which damaged ‘the credibility of deterrence’. On the same show, Maria Eagle, a PLP sniper with a seat on the front bench as the shadow defence secretary, essentially told Marr that she ...”

“... like the action of a stapler. A finger caught in the handle when it snaps is subject to a crushing motion, similar to being slammed in a car door. Quite painful. Too painful, my brother decided at the time, to drive with – and there is no other way to get to a hospital from where he lives. Besides, he had had countless minor injuries before, and all had ...”

“... and sexual violence of these epics. In 1930, Ladislas Starevich and his daughter Irene made a stop-motion puppet movie called Le Roman de Renard. In their version of the ice-fishing episode, Isengrim (not his wife) puts his tail in the freezing water; Reynard then cries wolf to the villagers, who arrive with sticks and clubs. The film culminates in a long ...”

“... rebels home. These promises were then withdrawn, and the trial and punishment of the rebels set in motion. Many were executed. The rising did at least put an end to the new poll tax that had been one of its major causes. The next government to attempt a poll tax was Thatcher’s. Juliet Barker has written a splendid account of the events of 1381 and their ...”

“... to arrange a legislative amendment which would reduce the City’s poor-rates; and it is the motion by which Parliament censured him that remains the source of its own rule against the venal intrusion of economic interests. What still needs debating is whether the Register of Members’ Interests is an adequate means of enforcing it. The effect of the ...”

“... acceptable face of Scottish communitarianism. His foremost predecessor, the anti-Unionist patriot Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1653-1716), has recently enjoyed some celebrity beyond Scotland in the wake of John Pocock’s voyages around the civic humanist tradition. Fletcher is immediately unsettling, with his vision of a Europe of city-states and his modest ...”

“... like ships on a sea of clay and rotten rock that after a week of rain slides below them in slow motion. In the old days, after several wet weeks there would be landslips in the cuttings that took the tramlines down to the promontory where the line comes into the open at a point on the fault scarp (it shows on the map as a ruled line along the west side of ...”

“... in the two volumes: indeed, in the essays which have anything to say about pay policy – Andrew Thorpe on the Labour Party and the unions, Andrew Taylor on the Tories and the unions and Robert Taylor on Woodcock – it is contradicted. Andrew Taylor writes that Edward Heath made ...”