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“... 1982, Terry McCluskie and his friend Raymond Reynolds picked a fight with a total stranger, Robert Ford, and stabbed him to death. Ford was 15 years old and had just taken his girl-friend home after spending an evening at a local Citizens’ Band radio club. McCluskie, also 15, and Reynolds, 14, had spent the evening drinking and were on their way to a ...”

“... satire and after. He asks me if we ever had any alternative titles to Beyond the Fringe, which was Robert Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ...”

“... made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ... It is poetry because it is better than prose.’ A New Path to the Waterfall is poetry because it is better than prose. Another ...”

“... from America? Advocates of the ‘natural transfer’ hypothesis, including Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo, credited as the discoverers of HIV, have assumed that Aids was an old disorder which became subject to the medical gaze only when Westerners were affected. And how had that come about? A disease long contained within certain isolated Central African ...”

“... or somebody – some murderer – like that. He had probably misread a communication from Robert (The Great Terror) Conquest. Anyway, it is already pretty clear that one of the chief excitements of this publication will be in finding out who has been dumped on, and how badly. Few well-known names escape the Larkin lash and although Anthony Thwaite ...”

“... and benefactors, as an attempt, he claimed, to ‘promote virtue and piety’ in his readers. Robert Schofield is well qualified to follow Priestley’s uneven path across the intellectual landscape of 18th-century society. He was trained during and after World War Two as an atomic physicist and engineer, at a moment when once again practical science ...”

“... a man called Warner who lived in Normandy wrote a very dirty Latin poem. Addressed to Archbishop Robert of Rouen, it relates the adventures of an Irish grammarian called Moriuht, who has a series of graphic and often disturbing sexual encounters while searching for his wife, who has been kidnapped. He is captured by Vikings, chained, flogged, urinated ...”

“... contributing in a loud, shrill voice remarks like ‘Mr Henry was a heavy man – nearly 16 stone – it was a job for him to push his bicycle uphill’ – in the middle of all the other conversation wh: he couldn’t hear. Her humour was in that tradition in which her father and her uncle Ronald excelled, and which Punch, at its best, epitomised. In ...”

“... would be affected by the verbal and textual equivalent of the ‘noise and dust and unwanted stone’ that miners are faced with when cutting coal. Despite activists telling their stories, the most influential version of the strike concentrated on high politics, and concerned the legitimacy, legality and efficacy of the NUM’s strategy, as well as the ...”

“... soon got out of hand. One boy made a gun from an old candlestick, loaded it with gunpowder and stone, and managed to kill a calf; ‘the owner complayned, the master whipped, and the division ended.’Under the old religion, children had been treated as helpmeets rather than believers, deployed at altars or in choirs, marshalled to act out spectacles. On ...”

“... retrospectively read it as evidence of their election. For others, it may have been a stepping stone to deeper disillusionment with all forms of organised religion.Hunter insists that godly doubt must be distinguished from bold and unabashed atheism of the kind espoused by Derpier and Vavasour. He critiques the instinct to conflate them in some recent ...”

“... and unproblematic, even something of an anticlimax’. Elizabeth’s principal secretary, Robert Cecil, had without her knowledge masterminded a succession plan, starting a clandestine correspondence with James two years before her death. Accordingly, James had been shown the proclamation announcing his accession that was read aloud at Richmond Palace ...”

“... in six years’ exile in the States was not on Broadway or in Hollywood, but the cigar-smoking stone-walling in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington; and in one of the last things he wrote, days before his death (in 1956), a note to his Berliner Ensemble on their forthcoming visit to London, he was unillusioned, even prophetic ...”

“... ne li atti questa bella petra’ (‘In my speech I want to be rough/as this beautiful stone [-hearted woman] is in her deeds’) – can be heard behind Montale’s great opening from the Mediterraneo sequence: ‘Avrei voluto sentirmi scabro ed essenziale/siccome i ciottoli che tu volvi’ (‘I would have liked to feel harsh and essential/like ...”

“... ineffectiveness was partly caused by ineffective leaders. Where was the Labor equivalent of Sir Robert Menzies – a man of great physical presence and even greater political cunning? The answer, when it finally came, was Gough Whitlam. He was a man of commanding height, a middle-class barrister like Menzies, a skilled debater, supremely self-confident, a ...”