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“... young Russian couple – Yulia and Vitaly Stepanov – who helped expose a vast doping conspiracy. David Walsh, a sports journalist for the Times with a good record of uncovering cheats (he wrote about his role in exposing Lance Armstrong in his previous book, Seven Deadly Sins), tells their story with the breathless drive of an airport thriller. The ...”

“... motives are transparent. As transparent is the Smarties Grand Prix, which Jill Paton Walsh won for her children’s book, Gaffer Samson’s Lunch, in 1984: Nestlé’s want to associate a product which is bad for children’s teeth with one that is thought to be good for their minds. The Encore fiction award, which gives a handsome prize ...”

“... accepted Boeing’s tender for a massive new cargo aircraft for the United States Air Force, David Lodge would not have been able to write Paradise News. Instead, however, Lockheed got the contract, and Boeing were left with a redundant set of blueprints for the biggest furniture van never built. To save all that development money going to waste, they ...”

“... wrote. Stravinsky of course remained immune – but that’s another story. The first volume of David Nice’s Prokofiev biography stops when the 44-year-old composer settles in Moscow with his Spanish wife, Lina, and two young sons at the end of 1935. But it describes in detail the eight preceding years, during which Prokofiev lived and worked as a ...”

“... secret league of kindred spirits,’ like – he might have added – the Davidsbund, or League of David, which he had portrayed in his own early piano works in the guise of an alliance against the untalented, anti-progressive Philistines. The NGS, precisely, was a Davidsbund. Schumann would not have tolerated the exclusion of Brahms, and he would have been ...”

“... vivid feel for characterisation, that of adolescents in particular, as if the first part of David Copperfield were being written today in exotic places. Paradise concludes in a fashionable aporia – its author is after all an academic – but both novels seem successfully to resist the anxieties of contemporary influence, and to behave, as it were, in ...”

“... of the Christian poet. The fine Oxford edition of Smart by Karina Williamson and Marcus Walsh has already made discussion and elucidation of his religious poetry highly sophisticated, and this is also largely taken for granted by Guest, who can further refine interpretation of some particularly cryptic passages of Jubilate Agno and of the ...”

“... translations supplied by James Hardiman, John O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry, John O’Daly, Edward Walsh, Samuel Ferguson and other sources. It is impossible to know how Mangan could have written so many poems and essays in a few years beset by poverty, illness, drunkenness and what he himself called ‘moral insanity’. Mangan’s place in Irish culture is ...”

“... a spread of generations, from Brian Coffey (1905-95) and Jonathan Griffin (1906-90) to Catherine Walsh (b. 1964) and Fred D’Aguiar (b. 1960), and represent a wide diversity of poetic practices. They also tell us the names of another fifty-odd poets they would have liked to put in – ‘significant omissions’ we can pursue elsewhere. As a rule, anthology ...”

“... wimpish Frances Peverell signals the obvious prompt to Dame Phyllis (obligingly picked up by John Walsh in the Independent magazine). The drag, for this reviewer, was being caught up in an unforgiving ‘Garlands of English Literature’ quiz set by a bright, time-warped 16-year-old from the Cambridge High School for Girls. You daren’t skip-read for fear of ...”

“... those of 1945, 1964 and 1997; neither has found any inspiration in 1924 or 1929. Peter Clark and David Torrance both set out to reassert the political importance of the 1924 government and to restore the place of its senior figures in the history of the Labour Party. Both focus on high politics, and in particular the way the members of the first Labour ...”

“... in my novel The Autograph Hound. The picaresque pursuits of its celebrity-hunting busboy, Benny Walsh, showed him assailed, seduced and driven crazy by the proliferating imagery of Hollywood’s razzle-dazzle, its voodoo of escape. Benny was some kind of buoyant sleepwalker, mesmerised by the lives and narratives of celebrated others. His adulation was also ...”

“... January, they have been managed by a new Task Force Europe, led by Johnson’s chief negotiator, David Frost, a burly, acerbic diplomat, one of the few in the Foreign Office who has always loathed the EU. Frost’s conversations with Michel Barnier have become openly bitter and recriminatory, in a way not seen before. Frost is backed up by contemptuous ...”

“... form as we once knew and loved it. Wasn’t Humphrey Bogart as Roy ‘Mad Dog’ Earle, in Raoul Walsh’s film of W.R. Burnett’s High Sierra, undone by a barking mutt on the mountainside? How else could these gnarled recidivists signal their hearts of gold, if not by palling up to an orphan kid or stroking a shaggy pooch? Sallis belongs, as I discovered ...”

“... that someone from nowhere can take everywhere by storm. Her new manager is the teen-wrangler Louis Walsh, who can be seen making and breaking young hopefuls every Saturday night on the television show Popstars: The Rivals. Out of her troubles – and the overcoming of her troubles – Lulu has become poster-girl for a new generation of the enduringly ...”