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“... a job demonstrated his insouciance by turning up for an interview with a transistor radio playing pop music held up to his ear. The actor playing the role used to carry a real radio tuned to an actual broadcast. On the night in question it was suddenly interrupted by a newsflash: ‘President Kennedy has been assassinated.’ The actor quickly snapped the ...”

“... unnatural deaths of famous men were threatening to become the tradition rather than the freak. Pop music had its own long roll-call of the overdose: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and a dozen more; Judy Garland had heroically outlasted Marilyn Monroe, and the not unconnected Kennedys were slain. Vietnam and the political assassinations continued the ...”

“... anxious merely to sell a lot of copies of his book? Is he seriously concerned about football or pop music, and if so from what point of view? Why, if he is, does he think that a book on the player’s life will help? All these questions, or appropriate equivalents, arise in the case of a biography of a reigning monarch. The market is there – several ...”

“... tended to be dismissive, The Face, a magazine dedicated to keeping up with the latest in clothes, pop music and life-styles (‘In twenty years’ time people will look back at present issues of The Face in order to see what the circa 1984 era was all about,’ a reader writes), finds the Omega saga ‘fascinating, not to be missed’. The best-publicised ...”

“... apprentice during the storms and triumphs that come their way when their eldritch folksy pop music transfers to Australia in a welter of guitars, penny-whistles, Tam Lin, Thomas the Rhymer, drugs, inspiration and greed. All this casts a spell on the escapist Richard Miller. Darcy, spokesman for an alternative theology, had learnt that there were ...”

“... Some of the stories in Secret Villages were published in the New Yorker, some in Encounter and some in Punch. It is interesting to compare the three styles. Those for the Americans make Scotland seem a wee bit exotic, romantic, with an unobtrusive sprinkling of factual information, as if a local were explaining to the tourists, the summer people. For Punch readers it is assumed that Scotland is already pretty familiar, and the stories may have a punch-line ...”

“... fashioning one which looks like new. Some shops have stereo speakers out on the pavement, blaring pop music at full volume. The fruit and vegetable stalls in the covered market are sheer delight. Everything looks magnificent – chillies and ginger root, okra and beans, pineapples, bananas, fine local potatoes. You can grow almost anything in Uganda, and ...”

“... painting, classical music in the Twenties and Thirties, the foundation of a native ballet, pop music in the Sixties – which he does with considerable confidence and resource. But when the book is read, one does not feel that a synoptic view of a century’s artistic activity has been recorded: the Lamberts were, after all, marginal figures ...”

“... today are relativist, shallow, self-centred, unread, moved only by the wild uncivilised strains of pop music, and incapable of forming and appreciating deep and lasting attachments. Bloom’s criticism is unusual because it involves no hope that improving American universities will result in a better world for everyone. Bloom considers this idea an expression ...”

“... a cheap varnish of internationalism, made up of fast food, cut-rate travel, chain stores and pop music tended to make all Europe seem like one big sleazy airport’. Nor are such readers likely to be unhappy about Peter’s insistent historicism (he is, after all, an embryonic professional historian), which studs the pages with such comments ...”

“... so, as Angela Carter (20 in 1960) asks: ‘Where did it all fit in? All the Swinging London stuff, pop music, hemlines? ... the relaxation of manners, the sense of intellectual excitement, even the way, oh God, you didn’t have to shave your armpits.’ The insouciance of her question veils her inability to answer it. She declares that this was the first and ...”

“... change from beetroot, though. I’ve ate more beetroot than Poland. Richard and Archie talk about pop music. For those who know about that the book has an extra dimension. It is used as a cultural shorthand, and is doubtless as useful as middle-culture ones (which deal in Turner sunsets, Kafkaesque situations and so on). Music is also a source of ...”

“... an overdose of sleeping pills. In a sparkling homage, far more readable than most books about pop music, Murray argues that the extravagant left-hander who introduced a new vocabulary to rock guitar-playing was the unsung progenitor of a jazz we will never know. In their very extravagance, Murray’s claims are consistent with his subject, for Jimi ...”

“... in the forefront of popular consciousness: American football and nuclear war (End Zone, 1972), pop music (Great Jones Street, 1973), communications from outer space (Ratner’s Star, 1976), clandestine intelligence (Running Dog, 1978), terrorism (The Names, 1982), suburban life and ecological disaster (White Noise, 1985), the assassination of President ...”

“... that all advertising was evil, all journalism a threat to the survival of the species, all pop music a sure way of catching something called ‘sex in the head’ (an ailment we spotty ones already suffered from, and how). We read Brave New World so as to learn how things might work out if we did not read Brave New World. And Nicholas Monsarrat’s The ...”