“... positions but ripe for removal; like those who controlled the Light Programme in the years before rock’n’roll. Several novels and short stories have absorbed and portrayed the rave revolution over the years, and now raving is being given a history. There’s no consensus about its origins: to some of the writers discussed here, there’s a clear break ...”

“... Say ‘David Storey’ and readers of my (and his) generation will recall the final shot of This Sporting Life: Frank Machin (Richard Harris), mired, spavined, raising himself on the rugby field to lurch back into hopeless battle. His life as a professional is over. Football chews up its workforce faster even than the pits ...”

“... the Stock-Exchange crash of 1873 that gives him his big break. ‘Select sound stocks and buy at rock-bottom prices’ – acting on his own maxim, Gustav becomes a magnate overnight. He marries Else Dreinach, daughter of a Viennese scholar, and in 1889 completes the building of a vast and vulgar schloss in a suburb of Vienna called Pernsdorf. Else dies ...”

“... someone else back and that’s what neither of them was good at.28 March. Another death, this time David Storey whom I liked and found sympathetic, though I might run into him only occasionally and most often in M&S. It was always cheering, even if these days he was often shuffling as much from the medicines he was taking as from old age. But he would call me ...”

“... man to whom nobody much wants to listen; and Victor Joseph, who doesn’t want to call a Spokane rock band ‘Coyote Spring’ because it sounds ‘too damn Indian’. Of these Victor seems to be the most important, the one for whom Alexie imagines a life-history. He is a small scared child in the collection’s first stories, the product of his ...”

“... absorb the terror that surrounded us’. The household moved to be near Klein’s parents on ‘a rock’ in British Columbia, three hours from the nearest city. ‘Going online to try to find some simulation of the friendships and communities I missed,’ Klein found instead ‘The Confusion: a torrent of people discussing me and what I’d said and what ...”

“... Tippett was using an electric guitar, keyboard and drum kit to pump the liberating funk of jazz, rock and blues through his tightly constructed score.Tippett’s work gleefully upended assumptions about the music Great English Composers ought to be writing, and implied that British new music – equally suspicious of European modernism and anything ...”

“... black-loaded brush, dragging a jagged stuttery line almost from top to bottom. That was to be the rock edge of Etna’s crater. Where the volcanic glow was to fall, Rosa slapped on a queasy mid-tone mix of sienna and smalt blue; capped it with brisk blurts of white; later, knocked the resulting rock planes back into ...”

“... Throughout his life, John Betjeman used avuncular charm and boundless enthusiasm to disguise a rock-sized chip on his shoulder: his lack of a university degree. He was diffident about having a father in trade, displeased with his public school (Marlborough), disappointed in his failure at Oxford (ironically enough, because he couldn’t pass the compulsory ...”

“... when an evil scam, Operation Wildlife, which seeks to snatch an Islamic terrorist on or off the Rock of Gibraltar, disastrously fails, with consequences which eventually enable you to identify the opposing sides, Smiley’s people, as it were, and their enemies. On one side is a country which consists of charming, sometimes simple souls, Toby Bell of the ...”

“... announces: ‘Sir, there’s an unruly mob to see you.’ Or when, in the movie, the members of a rock band on a sinking raft suddenly drop their guitars and pick up violins, so they can play ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ as they go under. But the movie doesn’t have any of the really inspired moments that mark certain of the episodes, and perhaps ...”

“... 5000 novels 0.001 per cent of the material was about sex; 0.003 per cent was drugs, 0.001 per cent rock ’n’ roll. Sex doesn’t sell after all, and takes up twice as much space in non-bestsellers as it does in bestsellers. In fact what matters isn’t so much the subject itself as the proportions in which a novel’s subjects appear. A third of John ...”

“... like subject rulers in an Assyrian relief, or when Mary Magdalene is made to seem part of the rock on which the cross is raised. ‘Christ Carrying the Cross’ Delacroix was appalled by this evocation of Giotto and Ravenna. Writing in his journal in 1855 after a visit to the Exposition Universelle, he expressed enthusiasm for British painting – for ...”

“... to Sabine Rewald, by two sepia drawings of his studio windows with the River Elbe beyond by Caspar David Friedrich. The drawings are exact in their rendering of casements, panes and the gradation of light on bare walls, and careful in their delineation of the distant riverbank. The frugal medium and the impersonal quality of the draughtsmanship give you the ...”

“... David Reubeni​ posed a puzzle to contemporaries; he still poses one today. The Mediterranean world was turbulent in the early decades of the 16th century. The Ottoman Empire toppled the Mamluks in 1517, giving the sultan control over Egypt, Syria and much of the Arabian Peninsula; Western Christian rulers feared that they might be next ...”