“... supplies of the good stuff: And so it was that Jim Crace fell from the sky. Alison Moore and Henry Sutton and Hilary Mantel fell from the sky, Ali Smith and Marcus Mills too. Their books fell from the sky in their thousands, parachuted into parks and on to roundabouts in towns and cities across the barren and would-be suburban land. The heavens opened ...”

“... in the late summer of 1965, opening with that lone staccato snare-shot which heralds the raw power of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ending 51 exhausting minutes later with the bleak dream vignettes of ‘Desolation Row’. Then a few months later came the altogether more baroque double album Blonde on Blonde, with its crepuscular, druggy ambience, its ...”

“... in July 1945. The new government had a decisive majority and Bevan moved briskly to break the veto power that doctors had wielded against health reforms. By March 1946 he had produced his own White Paper, covering general practice, hospitals and public health. What he was proposing, said one critic, was ‘the greatest seizure of property since ...”

“... shrouded corpse of Oliver Cromwell, dead on 3 September 1658, was disinterred from the east end of Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey and, along with the purported corpses of two other regicides, conveyed to Tyburn, where the three dead men were executed on 30 January 1661. Left hanging all day, the now re-dead bodies were decapitated and thrown ...”

“... outset is open to question, but they were certainly backed by a formidable ego. ‘He just exuded power,’ his adopted daughter recalled, ‘and I was afraid of him.’ When he wasn’t yelling at people, he was often punching or slapping them or treating them to exhibitions of fender-ripping road rage. ‘The threat of violence, and a willingness to act on ...”

“... the many other times when leavis wanted to put someone down, the model for his prose was Henry James, than whom no stylist could be more ornate and mandarin. If he wished to Invoke the authority of a central critical tradition, he was adept at echoing Arnold. Coleridge or Samuel Johnson, as he did in his assault on C.P. Snow: ‘The peculiar quality ...”

“... between the average scientific worker in the average research laboratory and those whose climb to power has been along narrower, more aristocratic paths. For all that, we are remarkably well-served by our scientific top brass – certainly by comparison with many other countries. They seem quick to pick up the techniques of court politics (for they never have ...”

“... meaning as they did before the right to buy. Football seems to retain some potential healing power, despite the racism and homophobia that was directed towards Fashanu. Sterling has hopes that the Justin Fashanu All-Stars (a real team founded in 2009) will build ‘alternative worlds of amateur football’, where ‘new socialities and support ...”

“... about stylistic decorum. ‘The lousiness of affairs in this place,’ he wrote to his friend Henry Savile in 1679, ‘is such (forgive the unmannerly phrase! Expressions must descend to the nature of things expressed) ’tis not fit to entertain a private gentleman.’ (‘Lousiness’ is about as tame as it gets in the Rochester lexicon.) One way to ...”

“... selected from Leavis what chimed with his own socialism, and discarded what didn’t. Leavis’s power as a critic is based on close readings of individual poets and novelists or of passages in poems and novels – readings executed with ferocious concentration. Williams does not excel at close quarters, and can seem unfocused, perfunctory or obvious. Leavis ...”

“... mothers to find support. Viniculture required management and busy hands rather than muscle power. So also did dairying. The resultant age and sex distribution therefore has a rational base, even if it is too early as yet to be sure of causation. It would be interesting to see the relationship of these areas where it was relatively easy for women to ...”

“... were overthrown by two notably uncunning men: the inexorable Mr Starr himself, and Representative Henry Hyde, the very bright but un-Macchiavellian chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which has been examining the Starr referral to determine if impeachment is appropriate. Hyde is a loyal Republican of course, but his loyalty to the institutions of ...”

“... there’s something to be gained by charting the minutiae of stylistic and formal innovation. Henry James and James Joyce, for example, seem hardly to be writing in the same century, but if one inserts a few writers between them the journey from The Portrait of a Lady to The Portrait of the Artist doesn’t seem very long. Still, times have changed since ...”

“... jazz signified a ‘special Jewish/black interaction’. (Today we might simply call it showbiz.) Henry Ford’s virulently anti-semitic Dearborn Independent, which serialised The Protocols of the Elders of Zion for much of the Twenties, denounced ‘Jewish jazz’ as ‘the moron music of the Yiddish Trust’, comparing its ‘sly suggestion’ and ...”

“... only to be faced with a massive uprising of peasant worshippers (the background to Greene’s The Power and the Glory). Though Marnham omits the involvement of such Church commandos as the Society of Catholic Ladies in the attacks on the murals, he doesn’t miss the irony of Chapingo. Just when Rivera was, in paint, liberating the peasants from the clutches ...”