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“... two decades could be summed up in a single title, it would surely be ‘Lost in the Funhouse’. John Barth’s short story, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1967, was a composite text in which an account of a family’s visit to a fairground was spliced in with what appeared to be a set of instructions from a fiction-writer’s manual. The funhouse (in ...”

“... became a symbol of British identity. ‘On the other side of the Channel, Paris is France, but no such rule applies with us,’ the Birmingham Daily Press explained. ‘Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and other towns must be asked their opinion’ before London makes any decisions. In Gaskell’s North and South, it’s only when the spectre of ...”

“... into Art; and their history has been rendered anodyne. The pictures in books such as this one do no service to that history. Still, if these pictures do seduce, they may also impel the smitten to discover more about the object of desire. For the intellectually curious the footnotes are a more than adequate bibliography. Mr Platt, I believe, claims far too ...”

“... emerged after everyone, Linder included, went to see the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976. Her early designs for friends’ record sleeves featured floating Expressionist heads (Real Life by Magazine) and photomontages inspired by Dada and Surrealism (the Buzzcocks’ ‘Orgasm Addict’). When she formed her own group, her persona ...”

“... In 1738 John Rocque, a Frenchman, began his survey of London. His map (engraved by John Pine) covers an area from Marylebone and Chelsea in the west to Stepney and Deptford in the east. It was finally published in 1747. Pasted together, its 24 sheets measure 13 x 6 ½ feet – that is how it is shown in the exhibition London 1753 at the British Museum until 23 November ...”

“... in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have ...”

“... that Mary was ‘a beauty’ with many young men to choose among. That the one she decided on, John Moore, was known only for his sense of humour and love of the theatre is puzzling at first – she has seemed so earnest – but it turns out that performance was something she too enjoyed. Pretending to be someone or something else, preferably a small ...”

“... When John Major ascended to 10 Downing Street, the wits were at first unsure quite how to set about him. There was the obvious, the elementary ‘grey’ approach: the Burton suits, the haircut, the delicious fry-ups and so on. On this reading, Major could be presented as a drearier-than-either cross between James Stewart and J ...”

“... reggae music, multi-media happenings, what have you. But bless me, it seems I was wrong. For if John Gross isn’t duplicating for a later generation what the Earl of Birkenhead did for mine, I don’t know what he and the marketing managers at Oxford University Press think they are doing. What readers can they think they are catering for, if not such ...”

“... for them, doubtless – the New Oxford Wits. Given a degree of literary fraternity, there is no reason why Amis should not have experimented in fiction with Raine’s Martian perspective. The law allows no copyright in technique or device, any more than in ideas. (Jacob Epstein’s offence, allegedly, was to use forms ...”

“... Sir Charles Worgan, a press baron, becomes the patron of a progressive theatre-manager, Holt St John. (Worgan also rather superbly patronises Oxford University, and receives an honorary doctorate for his efforts.) But Worgan soon falls out with St John, since he insists that art is an investment and that the theatre, like ...”

“... obscene’. So it is a comfort to find all these cruelties belied in the portrait of Moore by John Butler Yeats, reproduced in Gray’s book. There sits a harmless, walrus-moustached gentleman of 53, a little melancholy in expression, but by no means satyr-like, fresh-from-the-womb or squiffy. The year of the portrait ...”

“... a small island in the Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu, offers a contrasting picture. Ahamb had no history of witch-hunts, but while Bratrud was there a Christian revivalist movement took hold, leading to accusations and admissions of sorcery, and rituals of public discipline, punishment and murder. Bratrud’s account begins in 2009, when two men from ...”

“... permission to use the runnels and platforms for The Vertical Line, a performance piece devised by John Berger. In Ways of Seeing, Berger presented on television for the first time an ideological analysis of art and aesthetics. One of the programmes juxtaposed pin-ups and centrefolds with Titians, in a powerful early assault on advertising. Thirty years ...”

“... he leaves America, in the Nigerian consulate, where an ‘expediting’ surcharge, which generates no receipt, is required to make sure that documents are prepared in the timeframe stipulated as standard on the consulate website. The fee is to be paid by money order, in a way that looks official and above board but is nothing of the kind. All this happens in ...”