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“... British politics at the moment seem curiously provisional. The failures of the present government are so gross and obvious that hardly anyone, even its nominal supporters, attempts to defend it ideologically. Yet at the same time hardly anyone believes that Labour will really win the next election, or that it could cope even if it did. There is also a strong sense that the re-ordering of continental Europe, whose outcome is itself indeterminate, has rendered our political life even more provisional: it has obliterated the old landmarks but made it quite unclear where we now go ...”

“... nuts, ripe figs, pears, a fragrant herb to smell, thyme, basil, oregano . . . a red pomegranate flower a sprig of white jasmine. Then as we walked, hot and thirsty, a groaning green truck laden with leafy oranges driven by a black-clad priest drove past us. ‘Catch!’ he cried. The flung rogue orange rolled down the dusty hill till stopped by a wicket of ...”

“... the 35th time.Carpe diem but don’t translate carpe ‘seize’. Think of a day as a fruit or a flower and ‘seize’ at once sounds too grabbing, too rough. The verb carpo goes with flores, violas, lilia, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and in Virgil with rosam, poma, violas, papavera. Once you’ve taken the sense of snatching away you can simply, less ...”

“... whose legs now ooze out water, who can’t walk, how she was ‘champion at tap’, ‘the flower’ (she poises the petals on the now frail stalk) ‘of the ballet troupe at Blackpool Tower’. You won’t hear Gene, Eugene, Yevgeny speak to nurses now, or God, in any other tongue but Russian, and your dad’s the same with Greek, all that’s left to ...”

“... is transformed into a crazed animal. Well, as soon as it’s practicable, Wendy hobbles down to Flower Arrangement, or whatever it is they do on an afternoon, and says: ‘Listen, girls, big news. Drop the macrame, gather round. If you moan, they like it more. Besides which, they get to the point a damn sight quicker. Which will leave us more time for ...”

“... and interestingly derives from the Corinthians’ annual event: now at last I (as distinct from Tony Mason) understand how we come to have these singular, unfriendly friendlies (a historic occasion ever since, in one of them, the Spurs goalkeeper Pat Jennings scored – punted – a goal against Manchester United), these uncompetitive matches, the only ...”

“... One of the great pleasures of reading Tony Harrison is the sense of quick passage between worlds, the sudden switch from the local to the international and back. At one moment he immerses us in a Northern (or Midlands in my case) English worry about what happens to us socially when we drop our ‘h’s and pronounce our ‘u’s as in ‘wuss’ rather than as in (the Southern form of) ‘lustre’, the next he is wondering how to memorialise the dead of Hiroshima or the Gulf War ...”

“... of flowers cans of beer and more than one grave sprayed with some skin’s name? Where there were flower urns and troughs of water and mesh receptacles for withered flowers are the HARP tins of some skinhead Leeds supporter. It isn’t all his fault though. Much is ours. 5 kids, with one in goal, play 2-a-side, When the ball bangs on the hawthorn that’s one ...”

“... group of fat, rich nations feeding each other goodies’. Barbara Castle, Michael Foot and Tony Benn led a powerful Labour campaign against the Common Market, in itself a pejorative term on the left. But Roy Jenkins and others on Labour’s centre-right emphasised reconciliation with former enemies, highlighting in particular the community of purpose ...”

“... begins: ‘The seeds of progress took root and, after years of slow growth, burst finally into flower in the single, narrow-gauge track of the Grand Chemin de Fer Impérial d’Azanie.’ And there are passages of spoof jungle-Conrad no less funny: ‘Beyond the hills on the low Wanda coast where no liners called and the jungle stretched unbroken to the ...”

“... and Isaac Rosenberg. Both writers are named in ‘Bog Cotton’, a poem celebrating the ‘desert flower’ that is to his ‘war’ what the poppy was to his father’s. Longley’s poetry is thoroughly grounded, never permitted to track far into a abstraction away from landscapes and weather. (What other poet has so outrageously and beautifully pushed the ...”

“... are all very well but an active murder is far more juicy, ‘the builder who put this place up’, Tony Curran, is found bludgeoned to death in his kitchen, and the club sets to work solving the crime with a little help from a couple of the local plod, PC Donna De Freitas and DCI Chris Hudson.Coopers Chase is a private, closed community where everyone has a ...”

“... her husband, the vicar) sees this as an act of betrayal and defiance; she neglects the church flower rota and her parish duties, and is no longer considered capable of ministering to her family’s needs. Alienated, she succumbs to one of many fascinated men, and by doing so precipitates a chain of events which leads to the death of her husband. She makes ...”

“... by thumbing through red pulp memoirs, to be sure that they’d recognise Frankie Fraser or Tony Lambrianou when they poodled into the churchyard. Researchers were busy inventing quotes, hammering golden nuggets into the carious mouths of bemused recidivists. Photographers risked everything, setting rickety ladders on traffic islands, dangling from stop ...”

“... public domain. The hand-waving, the shifting from foot to foot, the rapid-fire presentation, the Tony Soprano accent promising infinitely less intelligence than it delivered, the only-seeming lowering of the scientific tone – a pose that Feynman himself called ‘aggressive dopiness’ – were all part of the most magnetic modern scientific act. To ...”