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“... small, perfect teeth. I was wondering what her kiss would taste like, when she picked up a Clive Cussler novel that everyone in the pod had read, and hucked it at the wall by the air intake. Bree encouraged her. ‘You throw that book, Kaitlin! Get it all out!’ She gave another snared-in-the-leg-hold cry, then hurled an N64 development folder ...”

“... members of the literary establishment’, are gunning for Larkin and Amis from all sides. With no Clive James or Martin Amis to stand up for the outlaw wordsmiths, the rescue operation, this time round, falls to Bradford, a professor at the University of Ulster who’s already written biographies of the Amises, father and son, plus Larkin, among others, and ...”

“... seen the publication of an important survey of the navy and Britain’s empire by Jeremy Black, Clive Wilkinson’s scrupulous analysis of Lord Egmont’s role as head of the Admiralty in the early 1760s, Margarette Lincoln’s richly suggestive discussion of the navy’s public image between 1750 and 1815, Glyndwr Williams’s wonderful book on Lord ...”

“... well before Wright. Homosexual smears were directed against Edward Heath, Jeremy Thorpe, Norman St John Stevas and Humphrey Berkeley; bogus bank accounts (showing corrupt earnings) were contrived for Edward Short and Ian Paisley; Wilson was seen as the beneficiary of, and a possible participant in, the assassination of Hugh Gaitskell; lists were drawn up of ...”

“... to any government in his lifetime. And then as the election approached there was Tebbit, what John Biffen called the ‘Raucous Tendency’ – ‘Dracula’, as he was more affectionately known in the Party – making a mess at Central Office and daring to hint at his coming succession. By the end of her second term, so often a risky time for a ...”

“... of Sir William Loraine. Brown’s father had been Loraine’s land agent and his elder brother John became the estate surveyor. Brown’s father died when Lancelot was only four, but means had been found to keep him at school until he was 16, possibly with the help of the Loraines, after which he went as an apprentice to the head gardener at Kirkharle. It ...”

“... could be misleading. This epitaph was written, in fact, by Anna Seward, to the love of her life John Saville, and she told a friend: ‘The last line is Dr Johnson’s. My imagination refused to supply me with one equally applicable, therefore it was adopted.’ Not quite the same as the ‘coincidence and indebtedness’ Miss Lascelles describes as ‘to ...”

“... baffled Orton – it was something else which disgusted him. When two homosexuals, Tom and Clive, stray into their ménage, they treat Halliwell ‘like shit’ and are only interested in Orton’s celebrity. Orton is without illusions: ‘their simpering over me was all you can expect from people like that. I saw through it. You saw through ...”

“... this understanding of history: even controversial figures like the rapacious conqueror Robert Clive were enrolled in the pantheon of imperial greatness. The statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston, toppled last year, was put up in 1895, though he died in 1721. But the strategy was a failure: more people learned about Colston in the 24 hours ...”

“... preachers among them) that 1857 marked the centenary of the Battle of Plassey, when Robert Clive asserted East India Company ascendancy in Bengal. In the event, it was gun cartridges that set the mutiny off: they were greased, the sepoys believed, with a blend of cow and pig fat, which would defile both Hindus and Muslims when they bit the ends of the ...”

“... and ‘damned puppies’ (‘I’d rather take a housemaid shooting than you, Lord Clive’) and swiftly ejected from the house while the three smallest children broke into a melancholy chorus of ‘Oh, we don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go.’ And that Nancy once pointed out to the three youngest sisters that the middle ...”

“... the crude evolutionary psychology that has become popular in recent years: that of Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Steven Pinker and their acolytes, who argue that we still have biologically fixed Stone Age minds constituted by mental models evolved to solve problems of Pleistocene environments, principally those of the African savanna of three million years ...”

“... for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by Polygon in ...”

“... with wide success. Birmingham, with its Political Union, was one of the more promising localities. Clive Behagg rejects the long-accepted account of concord being favoured by a small-unit industrial structure: big business took a prominent hand in the Union. This may of course make it less surprising that collaboration did not go further; at any rate, it was ...”

“... by tipsy reindeer – may be a tortuous folk-memory of this cult. According to the philologist John Allegro, if I remember his drift correctly, Jesus Christ was also a mushroom. More recently, the witches of Medieval Europe used such homely drugs as belladonna, henbane and mandrake, both in their role as crypto-medical ‘wise-women’ – the atrophine in ...”