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“... Places in fiction often have a curious dual nationality. They are entangled in historical events, marked on a solid social map. ‘It’s not exactly the moon I’m asking for,’ a girl thinks in The Dark Hole Days, ‘but surely all my dreams don’t end here: me in a duffle coat signing on the dole and walking in the debris of Belfast.’ Later she adds: ‘Belfast would fit into a corner of London ...”

“... out. My life is a long pilgrimage that is always turning on itself, always returning to the woods in the south, to the forest lost in me.’ This sounds like hocus pocus, and the weird, disavowing syntax is suspicious. The regions sink the roots, the roots can’t get out, and the forest gets lost. What is the poet doing all this time? Well, he’s ...”

“... tot up the cigarettes she smokes, mix in a crowd with improbable names – in Bridget’s case, Una, Piggy and Desdemona – and be hampered by an awful, overbearing mother (Fielding dedicated the novel to her ‘mum … for not being like Bridget’s’). Chick-lit novelists have stuck with this style, and their books continue to sell. Finding Myself, Toby ...”

“... of space flight became credible, there were no aliens; instead there were green men who hid in the woods. In the same way, psychotic delusions keep up with scientific change: the people once pursued by phantasms of the dead are now pestered by living celebrities who watch them from inside their TV sets, and those who used to confess themselves possessed now ...”