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“... boats from nostalgic black and white photographs. It was an unoptioned metaphor with its own poet, Simon Armitage, hired to knock up a thousand-line tribute. Time drifted. The 12 minutes of the virtual reality journey in the brochures was actually the time between trains, the time spent enjoying the strange termini in which potential travellers are ...”

“... affection, in the gentle manner of Yes, Minister. Like Sir Humphrey in the television programme, Simon Goldstone fears action might prove ‘counter-productive’ – an odd word to choose since there isn’t any productivity to be countered. Likewise Camp’s politicians are united by suspicion of altruism or crusades. They also exhibit a paradoxical ...”

“... I said. ‘Offences against the person.’ ‘Yes, that sort of lark. Plus I understand young Simon offered her the extra hundred a year.’ ‘Probably luncheon vouchers,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t wonder.’ ‘Occam’s Razor shaves you closer,’ I said. I had only begun to suspect something when he began multiplying explanations. My foot shot out ...”

“... a verdict of unlawful killing, which made possible the criminal prosecution for manslaughter of PC Simon Harwood. (He was acquitted.) The finding of death by misadventure in Peach’s case made any prosecution impossible, despite there being a strong argument for a second inquest. The High Court can order one, as it did recently on the Hillsborough ...”

“... was the fact that the working classes of Europe had spent the last four years trying to blow each other to bits. Eisner was not a man to ignore an elephant in the room; rather, he dressed it up in ribbons and bows and tried to pass it off as a peace offering. Germany was to blame for the horrors of the war, he readily acknowledged. But because ...”

“... and illicit knowledge. The formal teaching I received was shoddy. I remember conceiving of blow jobs as the purposeful application of air to the genitals. The first time I masturbated, I had to look up in the dictionary ‘wanking’ (the word I’d overheard), ‘masturbation’, ‘orgasm’, ‘ejaculation’ and ‘semen’ before I knew how to go ...”

“... Blincoe, be ‘the beginning of a new wave’ and present its adherents with ‘a chance to blow the dinosaurs out of the water’. This tongue-in-cheekiness, which from time to time comes across as a swaggering disrespect for all other contemporary writers, infects and distorts the editors’ ‘Pledge’, or manifesto, which opens the book and frames ...”

“... Pope. Nadia’s husband turns up in Lying together, having tried (I think I’m right in this) to blow up London with nuclear missiles from the Soviet submarine he commands. He rapes a version of Rozanov’s blind student (now a blind film-director) who – with her handicap – fondly thinks she is merely being made forceful love to by a version of ...”

“... to history as the Dozhdev line. The time is finally right for a currency reform, which at one blow eliminates state debt and converts enterprise and farm debt at a steep rate. Subsidies ... are sharply cut back and a tough bankruptcy law is enacted. Inflation falls to a moderate 20 per cent per annum ... economic growth responds sharply. By 2003 the ...”

“... which are thought to have existed between the leading members of the regime. Thanks to the work of Simon Adams, to whom we look for the definitive biography of Leicester, we now know that Naunton misled us in suggesting that the principal note of the reign was faction, whether deliberately contrived or not. Burghley and Leicester did not always get on, but ...”

“... this context, and in their use of it Ford’s poems have affinities with those of Glyn Maxwell and Simon Armitage. The habit all three poets have of paraphrasing rather than quoting the speech of their characters tends to upset stable perspectives by mingling the voices of author and character and so raising the question of whose point of view is influencing ...”

“... gloss on Trump’s philosophy. In the first pages of his memoir, The Room Where It Happened (Simon and Schuster, £25), Bolton takes pains to lay out how busy he was before joining the Trump administration and how eagerly Trump’s team pursued him. The first jobs he was offered in the administration were not big or important enough: he turned down ...”

“... his mistake; Anthea Cleveland has her heart temporarily broken by an Old Etonian undergraduate, Simon Beddoes; and Mr Cleveland, Anthea’s father, becomes infatuated with his pupil Barbara Bird, who is quite happy to return the sentiment so long as it does not entail kissing and ‘that sort of thing’. Francis Cleveland’s affair with Barbara is much ...”

“... and learn abstract concepts. ‘If one could devise a successful chess machine,’ Herbert Simon and others suggested in 1958, ‘one would seem to have penetrated to the core of the human intellectual endeavour.’ Combine this with its clear measures of success and readily formalised rules, and chess seemed to offer the perfect testbed for artificial ...”

“... passages of reconstruction, of supposition, of – let us spit the word out – fiction. Like Simon Schama he is dealing in ‘dead certainties’ and ‘unwarranted speculations’. But within the text the line is clearly drawn. The critic cannot claim to be confused. On the afternoon of 29 February, John Williams and the other Deerfield prisoners were ...”