“... their stocks of ideas too rapidly. ‘Our problem is that we never wanted to repeat,’ says David Thomas, singer with the early American post-punk group Pere Ubu. ‘That desire … became as much of a trap as trying to repeat formulas the way some bands do.’ Yet Reynolds is too busy working through all his overlapping band biographies to pursue this ...”

“... Astronaut Scott shoves Astronaut Oates off the steps of the module – ‘I am going up now. I may be gone for some time’ – and blasts off. For Dorothy, this is the end of all romance (‘Goodbye spoony Juney Moon’): the men are unworthy of the Moon. Opening in January 1972 at the Old Vic, Jumpers came two and a half years after the Apollo 11 ...”

“... school linked with mine was always known simply as the Boy from Chick. The hanging incident was in May. Two months later, the press arrived again. On Tuesday 13 July, the Metropolitan Police raided a house in Lees Holm, a mixed area between mostly Asian Savile Town and mostly white Thornhill Edge. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July bombers, had ...”

“... but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by ...”

“... the cowboy statue has sought protection from the elements and taken shelter indoors. Florence has David, also transferred from open to inner space; Orange County has John Wayne. Orange County, where unfettered individualism rises from a government-subsidised foundation in mineral wealth, agribusiness, aerospace and real-estate speculation. When John Wayne ...”

“... When Tooley stepped down in 1988 he’d been with the House since 1955, first as assistant to David Webster, the Liverpool department-store manager who’d built it up from its wartime use as a dance-hall, and then for 18 years as general director. The high point of Webster’s reign was the Georg Solti era (1961-71). Tooley presided over the rather ...”

“... which jumped around all over the place when he talked – which was a great deal of the time’. David Gascoyne described in his journal in 1936 how Jennings dominated a meeting of the English Surrealists, ‘as usual … boiling over with energy and excitement’. He reported, too, the scene when Jennings and Tom Harrisson met to discuss the formation of ...”

“... David Ben-Gurion​ , the founder of the state of Israel, was brooding, explosive, often on the verge of collapse: every obstacle he faced was a ‘catastrophe’. He dabbled in mysticism, consulted fortune-tellers, claimed to see flying saucers, and lived according to his whims. At one point he went on an unannounced holiday from his duties as prime minister to take driving lessons on the French Riviera; on another occasion, he spent a week studying Buddhism in Burma, and tried to persuade his teachers that he’d stumbled on a contradiction in their doctrine no one else had unearthed ...”

“... of Ireland and America, for instance), and ignoring the old world of genteel trade courtesies. It may have emerged in tandem with the legally defensible intellectual property rights that came into being at the beginning of the 18th century, in response to a rapidly expanding readership and a culture of inventors eager to exploit commercial ...”

“... admirable characteristics. No one esteems anyone else simply for being possessive, even if they may envy the power which some accumulate under the goading of their will to possess, or may enjoy and admire the skills which others develop at least partly under the same impulses. To own, to have at one’s disposal, to ...”

“... a home so costly as to exceed easily imagined explanations? The astronomical price of the Van Gogh may have been an eccentricity, rather than a milestone in the inevitable ascent to the $100 million canvas, and the same may be said of the $17.5 for which the Johns was knocked down. Indeed, the giddiness which characterised ...”

“... in point would be The Elephant Man (1980), a still from which appears on the cover of the book. David Lynch’s film may indeed demonstrate ‘time-worn points of view’ in some ways, and its central figure may indeed combine the stereotypes of the Sweet Innocent and the Saintly Sage ...”

“... properties to the government. What’s more, no information regarding property titles may be disclosed, so claimants can’t even begin to avail themselves of the nominal restoration of 1986. Such seemingly technical administrative measures have sufficed to prevent the opening of any new church (Armenian or otherwise), synagogue or non-Muslim ...”

“... our MPs merely put in for duck-houses, moat-clearance and jumbo TV sets). And as anti-Zionism may often disguise anti-Semitism, so Europhobia proves a handy disguise for wider xenophobia. But of course it wasn’t just the press. Few prime ministers in the years since Edward Heath signed us into the EEC have found it either natural or politically ...”

“... refuted the conclusion of the argument from design, without challenging its premises. Nature may be well designed, much as Darwin’s creationist predecessors thought, but good design doesn’t require a designer. Thus John Maynard Smith once defined biological adaptations as the sorts of trait that natural theologians would have mistaken as evidence for ...”