“... himself withdrew from circulation in the UK because of arguments about its depiction of violence; Jack Nicholson’s manic performance as writer-turned-axe-murderer: all of these images and associations, from Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1959), Dr Strangelove (1964), 2001 (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980) respectively, are ...”

“... credible chains of motive and causation were beyond him. He was a writer of the ‘With one bound, Jack was free’ school; the gun that inexplicably jams, the knock at the door at the very second the blade is about to fall were his stock-in-trade. But abundance trumps incoherence, and it can’t be denied that an awful lot happens in The Forbidden ...”

“... Hadley, the Thatcherite singer in an otherwise left-leaning band, was holding a glass of Jack Daniels. He seemed in touch with his audience and every bit as drunk. I’m not sure whether the audience knew his politics, but they heard the totemic sound of the 1980s in his voice, and a thousand facets of contemporary Britain seemed to sparkle in his ...”

“... Hyland enjoyed marvellous success with his ‘dramatick piece’ The Ship-Wreck of 1746, in which Jack Lookout and Tom Plunder prey on the ship of Captain Bluff, entangling Farmer Careful with the bureaucrats Mr Search’em and Mr Pick’em. There is as much hauling-to-mainsail, Huzzah!-ing, and whoring as you would hope, with a dash of political commentary ...”

“... pay with wooden tokens from the plantation. Sammie’s talents make him a target for Remmick (Jack O’Connell), a vampire, and his newly undead associates, a Klan couple whose racism Remmick uses for his own purposes (like so many politicians and industrialists before and since). Remmick was turned centuries before, in Ireland, by a rapacious, colonising ...”

“... has remained steadily loyal to jazz since the Thirties, and The Duke Ellington Reader is worth its price simply for Richard Boyer’s magnificent profile of the great man (‘The Hot Bach’), which first appeared there in 1944. It is safe to say that, at that time, in no American city outside New York would nightclubs like Café Society, militantly devoted to ...”

“... Mrs Graham to change her paper’s policy, while the President was using his principal aide, Jack Valenti, to bombard her with protests against the Post’s coverage of Vietnam. (Years later, in his memoirs, Valenti wrote that Katharine Graham, ‘a thorough-going professional who does her homework and knows her business’, endured his calls ‘wearily ...”

“... superior even to the first-class dining-room, was not part of the White Star liner’s inclusive price. Passengers who took their meals there instead of the first-class saloon, paid at the time for what they ate, though they were entitled to apply for a rebate at the end of the voyage. After the sinking of the Titanic, several survivors put in their claims ...”

“... their audiences with tales of the devastation being brought by advances in copying technology. Jack Valenti, the impressively lifelike head of the Motion Picture Association of America – one-time former fixer in the LBJ White House, recently chair of the Hollywood summit to discuss ways of supporting the war against terrorism – curdled our blood twenty ...”

“... the United Kingdom parliament. Sharing devolved government with the Liberal Democrats is a small price to pay for that. Seven years on from the first elections to the Scottish Parliament, it seems that devolution has soothed the nationalist itch. Yet, as Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan recognise in their study of the unionist political tradition, this ...”

“... as Mullin is reminded by the astoundingly mercenary Cherie Booth after leaving office. The price of accepting is to swell the payroll vote, and spout stultifying drivel. In 1999, Blair calls to offer Mullin a post as a bottom-ranking minister. First he accepts. Next day he resigns. Blair gets back on the phone. He dangles the prospect of promotion to ...”

“... imaginary titles such as Near is my King, but nearer is my Skin (‘to be sold at the Sign of the Jack-Pudding’); A Dissertation of the No Power of a No Parliament, making a No King, that will always be doing us No Good; and A New-invented Mathematical Instrument, by the help of which one may discover, that, the higher a Jackanapes climbs, the more he shews ...”

“... Object lessons included plum pudding, Saint George and the Dragon, posting a letter and the Union Jack. The school calendar was shaped by its special occasions: not just the annual tea provided by the Bonds up at Tyneham House, but the duly observed days of church, nation and state. On Empire Day the school was addressed by a visiting speaker, who ‘tried to ...”

“... state of near-mystical terror about the invasion and pillaging of her brain, ‘her treasure whose price he, not more than the nurses, could estimate’. In some way Stafford felt herself not only damaged but violated. Yet she fought against understanding her own anger, diverting it as much into meanness and booze as into art; indeed, she would have been ...”

“... one important difference, however. Sutcliffe’s case acted itself out as a reprise of the case of Jack the Ripper, which has lodged itself so tenaciously in the English folk memory: it was a kind of flashback to Victorian England, set in a similar milieu of urban blight, urban deprivation, prostitution, hypocrisy and misogyny. A substantial part of the ...”