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“... I turned round, on the barricades,’ she says in Vivienne Westwood, an autobiography written with Ian Kelly (rather than the usual ghostwritten celebrity tosh), ‘there was no one there. That was how it felt. They were just still pogoing. So I lost interest.’ SEX in 1975. The prevailing impression of Westwood that we get from the book is of a ...”

“... greeted with a gleeful salvo of puns and bon-mots, an echo of which can be heard in the title of Ian Kelly’s splendid new biography. Ever the theatrical opportunist, he was soon back onstage, with a new prosthesis and two new comedies fit for purpose: The Lame Lover, in which he played the lecherous Sir Luke Limp; and The Devil upon Two Sticks, a ...”

“... One of the few exceptions – and the most pertinent to Liam McIlvanney’s novel – comes in Ian Rankin’s Mortal Causes (1994), the sixth in his bestselling Rebus series, whose plot hinges on the victim’s association with extreme Protestant groups. Mortal Causes was written in the run-up to the IRA ceasefire and set before the Shankill Road ...”

“... scarcely be more dryasdust. What, I wonder, would he have made of ardent Berrymanes like Richard Kelly – editor ten years ago of Berryman’s letters to his mother (and of hers to him) and now the dogged itemiser of the poet’s book-hoard, or ‘personal library’, as it is rather grandly called here. Berryman the mad poet would presumably have allowed ...”

“... cent to 5 per cent. Confiscation and settlement alone, however, did not secure the Ascendancy. As Ian McBride emphasises, the Franco-Jacobite threat was temporarily removed in 1713, when France recognised the Protestant succession as part of the Treaty of Utrecht. Paving the way for the Anglo-French alliance of 1716-31, Utrecht allowed the consolidation of ...”

“... the few country-house painters of this century, notably Rex Whistler, John Piper and Felix Kelly, on the grounds that the tradition had been broken. As their work would scarcely have been disproportionately large had it been included, this is a pity, especially as, in the cases of Whistler and Kelly, it was a ...”

“... plain wrong. The Sunday Times, for example, was demonstrably mistaken when it announced that Gerry Kelly, one of Sinn Fein’s chief negotiators at Stormont, is a highly placed IRA man who is not even a member of the Party. Kelly, who was sentenced to life imprisonment after the 1973 Old Bailey bombing, may or may not be a ...”

“... for Bage’s merits as a novelist more strongly than even such perceptive predecessors as Gary Kelly or Marilyn Butler, Pamela Perkins balks at the novel’s romance ending. Walter Scott, who distrusted Bage’s politics, grudgingly praised the depiction of Hermsprong while asking: ‘But did such a man ever exist?’ – which suggests he had forgotten ...”

“... there was nothing of the austerity ideologue or dour corporate axeman about him. This wasn’t Ian MacGregor flying in to Thatcherise British Steel or tell the miners they weren’t working hard enough. He was a natural diplomat, consulting across the board before making his moves, always referring to Nissan as an equal partner, fluent in four ...”

“... V8 Land Rover, lightly armoured – which would travel the road out of Amara in the dark. Sergeant Ian Blackett was in the patrol’s first vehicle and had known Wakefield for five months. There were 14 men in the patrol and Wakefield was one of the most experienced. ‘He was a professional soldier,’ Blackett says. Some soldiers seem not to do much except ...”

“... together as a succession of details – not unlike the narrative of particulars that according to Ian Watt constitutes the ‘formal realism’ of the novel. Had Griffith already achieved a novelistic ‘formal realism’? Not exactly. As a storytelling medium, cinema lies somewhere between theatre and the novel, and Griffith remained pretty close to ...”

“... was the dominant emotion. A signalman described the consequences of an attack on the destroyer Kelly in 1940, on condition that he remained anonymous. That torpedo broke my nerve. Before, I always slung my hammock and undressed before getting into it, but after it I never slung it nor undressed when the ship was at sea. I slept as best I could on the ...”

“... a famously and unconvincingly negative life of Hitchcock, along with near hagiographies of Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn. His many years of friendship with Michael’s widow, Rachel, with whom he would have ‘late afternoon cups of strong tea at her flat in Flood Street, Chelsea’, incline him to say such things as ‘it is no exaggeration to assert that ...”

“... the stories of literary camaraderie or infighting. Ballard must have his reasons for dismissing Ian Hamilton, without deigning to name him, as a ‘self-important Soho idler’ who didn’t deserve Arts Council funding for the New Review, but the book would be more attractive without such spasms of sourness.) Ballard describes himself as an ...”

“... set’ was first coined. Concorde was built to move Princess Margaret, Noël Coward, Grace Kelly and Ian Fleming around the world. It was built to carry them to Barbados for the winter, and to New York to go shopping; to Buenos Aires to watch the polo, and to South Africa to go on safari. Since this pattern of use ...”