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“... folklore, flora and fauna, is the book’s subject, it is oddly elusive. Despite the fact that Tim Robinson’s account is the story of a pilgrimage, exhaustively detailed and loyal to every intimation, there is no ultimate moment or place of devotion. The quest is an end in itself, and it is not perhaps a quest for Aran but a quest to which Aran ...”

“... impossible place. The only way I can cross this countryside is by recourse to the English writer Tim Robinson, a cartographer and artist who cures the Irish nostalgia for landscape – that heart-sickness – by describing it in great detail, excavating the stories under every field and wall. The castle at Kylemore, with its ...”

“... he told me, it filled up that awful space to the south-west, giving him a feeling of security.’ Tim Robinson relates this, near the end of his double-work, Stones of Aran: pilgrimage and Labyrinth. ‘In reality Pangaea is broken,’ Robinson writes, ‘and all the mysterious bits and pieces circulating in the slow ...”

“... on £46,000 a year, Mandelson borrowed £373,000 (eight times his MP’s salary) from Geoffrey Robinson, an industrialist Blair put in the Treasury after New Labour’s victory. Robinson’s fortune had been inflated by dealings with Robert Maxwell, the Channel Island tax havens and a legacy from a satirically named ...”

“... to fight back in the culture wars’. In December 2019 at a Danube Institute event in Budapest, Tim Montgomerie, once Boris Johnson’s social justice adviser, praised Hungary’s ‘interesting early thinking’ on ‘the limits of liberalism’. The head of the institute is John O’Sullivan, a former Thatcher speechwriter, who was a session chair at ...”

“... sake of your intellectual work, which I prize above everything else in life, but for some sort of Robinson Crusoe game. You … dismissed the cook, who would have been happy to do some work in exchange for a stipend, and from morning to night you engage in inappropriate physical labour … I can only say, ‘Enjoy!’ – and still be upset that such ...”

“... George Monbiot – were drowned out by a host of detractors, from within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew ...”

“... now suddenly he can heal, all by himself; he cures the cripple Edward, but dies in the process. Tim takes over his father’s circus act until his grandparents die too, and he inherits their Wiltshire farmhouse, where he lives alone at the end of the novel. He no longer reads his English books, not because he doubts their value, but because he has already ...”

“... by the head of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, and the head of the New York branch of the Fed, Tim Geithner, was to summon a group of bank heads and tell them to put a deal together that would rescue Lehman. This was something that has been done a good few times over the years: a meeting of senior bankers to decide who’s going to pick up the tab for an ...”

“... and Iain Sinclair, or (apart from Roy Fisher) any of the poets collected in Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville’s 1987 anthology, A Various Art. Nor, at the other end of the spectrum, will we find poets such as Peter Robinson, Robert Wells or Clive Wilmer, or the Carcanet poets from the days when PN Review was called ...”

“... cheese’; ‘yada, yada, yada’; ‘Domo arigato, Mr Roboto’; ‘Nanu-nanu, beam me up, Will Robinson’; ‘Eeewww!’ He seems a lot happier explaining how more recent filmmakers have interpreted the monster. During the 1980s and 1990s, Godzilla’s attacks on Japanese skyscrapers made him, some thought, ‘a conscience for an arrogant economic ...”

“... shell in Hackney was friendship, fond memories of an earlier collaboration with the artists, Tim Noble and Sue Webster. That collaboration involved a private compound that was also a conceptual artwork in which the raven-haired couple could hang out and manufacture their signature products: the Dirty House in Shoreditch. Redchurch Street, a thin line ...”

“... Ballard(Tatler)Helen Chislett(Company)Victoria Glendinning(Listener)Ian Hamilton(Sunday Times)Tim Heald(Now)Thomas Hinde(Sunday Telegraph)Bernard Levin(Sunday Times)Blake Morrison(TLS)John Nicholson(Times)Richard Rayner(Time Out)Anthony Thwaite(Observer)MiddlingPaul Ableman(Spectator)Peter Conrad(Harpers & Queen)Alan Hollinghurst(New Statesman)Christopher ...”

“... anyhow, and it might be risky to pry: what is at best a ‘benign literary parasitism’, to quote Tim Parks, could ruin a good novel or poem for ever. It’s not just a question of revelation, of sordid details. I never thought about the reasons I didn’t read biographies, I just didn’t, and now I see that I distrusted them (and still do), that I thought ...”

“... embracing anti-scientific irrationalism. One way of telling this story – adopted by Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel Forty Signs of Rain – begins with the Scientists for Johnson Campaign, run by a group of eminent scientists who were worried about Barry Goldwater’s apparent eagerness to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and ...”