“... next Top Ten single. Originally, the song was called ‘Cosh the Driver’, a callous reference to Jack Mills, the British Rail employee beaten with a metal bar during the robbery by one of Biggs’s gang – he never fully recovered, and died seven years later. Virgin baulked at that, and the single was released as ‘No One Is Innocent (A Punk Prayer by ...”

“... morning: “Get up and get the stink blown off ye.”’ In the National Gallery we looked at some Jack Yeats paintings and then went to the shop, where I pointed to a line of postcards featuring Seamus. He tutted. I took one down, a portrait painted by Edward McGuire in 1974. It showed a sullen, tousle-haired graduate of the bog. Karl immediately plucked a ...”

“... the cabinet and outside it ready to help the prime minister along. And so much nodding, and from Jack Straw in particular, still nodding on the front bench today like a dog in the back window of a Fiesta. The newspapers fall for Butler’s smooth speaking even when they know how specious it is. One of his predecessors as master of University College, Oxford ...”

“... Ceylon alone among the former colonies not only retained but promoted the monarchy: the Union Jack flew alongside the Ceylon flag; a new constitution was drafted by an LSE professor, Ivor Jennings; Colombo debutantes were presented at Buckingham Palace; and, thanks to some genealogical ingenuity, George VI was recognised as the latest monarch in the ...”

“... with it an uncertain stigma. In 1983 Robert Fisk published In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality 1939-45 and this seemed to settle the argument about what Stuart had been doing in Germany. Fisk’s account of the episode was based on transcripts of Stuart’s broadcasts in the Northern Irish Public Record Office and an interview with ...”

“... slight, pale, bearded soldier in cammos smoking outside a restaurant called Mafia. He had a Union Jack patch on his sleeve. I asked if he was British. He said he was from Scunthorpe. He used to be a shipbuilder, but, he said, he was ‘attracted to war’. He’d fought in Syria. Now he was serving with a Ukrainian unit in Kramatorsk in Donbas, about fourteen ...”

“... and the city’s poorest citizens are notoriously bad: last year, according to the columnist Jack Shafer, when 700 blank rounds were fired in one of those neighbourhoods, nobody called the police. New Orleans’s homicide rate is ten times the national average. ‘Unless the government works mightily to reverse migration,’ Shafer wrote, ‘a positive ...”

“... an ‘association of practices’. This would be one way of describing what Ginzburg has done. The price, however, is the same. Just as, at the level of the paradigm, there is no way of identifying what is not a valid form of divination, so at the level of the morphology there is no point at which the associations need ever stop – falsifications never ...”

“... Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the long-deified Mrs Siddons and very many more. There were peers of the realm, baronets, famous churchmen, a duchess. One hundred or so of these subscribers had been the subjects or recipients of ...”

“... continued, with Maxton, James MacDougall, a friend of Maclean’s who was also in the BSP, and Jack Smith, another shop steward, held after speaking at a demonstration in favour of the deported men. ‘Not a rivet should be struck on the Clyde until the deported engineers are returned to their families,’ Maxton had said. ‘In case there are any ...”

“... was writing that chapter, he had this painting in front of him and was describing it. The dealer, Jack Spink, is delighted to have this information and uses it to advertise the picture. He recognises it as an unusual object, with excellent ‘associative’ value, and is sure it will make a quick sale for a good ...”

“... and then when I fixed I could say: ‘Hey, wait a minute! I gotta feed mah man! He’s hungry, jack!’ You know. ‘Come on, baby, I gotta go first. Mah man’s hungry. He needs some blood!’You can see some of the tattoos in the super-grotty ex-felon pic of him – a cadaverous Nan Goldin-style mug shot – on the cover of Art Pepper: Living Legend ...”

“... and British (if not also American) governments was made clear when it was echoed word for word by Jack Straw in the House of Commons. The formula allowed the government to give the public the impression that Libya was indeed guilty, while also allowing Tripoli to say that it had admitted nothing of the kind. The statement does not even mention al-Megrahi by ...”

“... year of US $26,000, higher than that of Britain, Australia or Canada. Under the discreet Union Jack and omnipresent portrait of the Queen (governors, mostly former diplomats, kept a low profile) it was as stable, secure and friendly to money-making as any place on earth has ever been. There was no audible call for local self-rule, a strange idea to most of ...”

“... one night in Waukegan, Illinois – fabled town: was it not the Waukegan conservatory that taught Jack Benny the violin? – the brothers looked past the footlights and saw at the piano, inexplicably, the wandering right hand of Chico, whom they had long since written off. Harpo, wearing a fruit-covered hat, plucked an apple and an orange, Chico dodged and ...”