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“... observed. William Rothenstein thought him ‘armed and armoured, like a tank, ready to cross any country, however rough and hostile’. He certainly had a genius for pugnacity, no doubt partly encouraged by the example Hulme set: ‘a very rude and truculent man’ in Lewis’s judgment, than which there could be no higher praise. (‘He needed to ...”

“... notable because the Bad Thief is depicted as fat, a great beer gut sagging down from the Cross. Everyone – the Holy Family apart – is grotesque, while Christ himself is so idealised he belongs in a different painting, crucified against a blue and white sky that looks like a map of the world. His thighs are concealed by dancing draperies, and ...”

“... an estimated 500,000 files by the mid-1950s, was organised according to an elaborate system of cross-referencing between Personal Files, Subject Files and Y Boxes, designed to separate highly sensitive files from general access (all suspected spies, as well as defectors, were Y-Boxed). An officer could only obtain a Y Box – marked with a yellow card ...”

“... who can presume to say? ‘Tradition is kindred’: perhaps that is true; perhaps a great cross-roaded mind has blundered: ‘nadir to nadir’, riches to rags; in the temple of order decapitated stone figures struck from niches; mobbed cattle with their drool and ordure; at their hooves dogs. So what do you make of that? Salamis was the famous naval ...”

“... Dory consists of pastiches of Bowie’s musical heroes of the 1960s – John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops on 5 July ...”

“... maybe a fable, about a Displaced Persons camp somewhere in Germany at the end of the war. Red Cross and UNRRA ladies are interviewing survivors from the concentration camps. ‘Well, Mr Lemberger, and where would you like to go now?’ ‘New Zealand.’ ‘New Zealand? But that’s awfully far away!’ ‘Far away from what?’ To me as a wartime ...”

“... Victoria King, who was 71, and her daughter Alexandra Atala, on the 20th floor, never made it out. Anthony Disson, 65, a former bin man and Fulham fan, left it very late before trying to get out of his flat. ‘We used to go “totting” together,’ his son, Lee, said. ‘You know, scrap iron. He had a big horse called Lady and a little Shetland’ – he ...”

“... Reynolds being properly respectful to a big influence on Bowie that other critics shy away from: Anthony Newley, a Light Entertainment renaissance man – actor, singer, songwriter – who trod the thin line between shameless MOR schmaltz and nervy conceptual daring. This is a great lost period of pop history, with its dozens of little papers and ...”

“... but the chapters themselves unassigned; my guess is that the survey of the queer scene is by Anthony Blond, also the book’s publisher. Its tone is both hip and cagey, totally au fait with bars, clubs and cruising spots that the writer cannot yet name: it’s a tantalising guide, innuendo just short of the really useful statement. On the north side of ...”

“... held firm. By 2 March, the attack had been exhausted. Hossein Kharrazi was one of the last to cross a pontoon that had been thrown back across the marsh. As he went, his right arm was shot to bits. He shouted at the men ahead of him: ‘Go on! Don’t come back for me!’ At least twelve thousand Iranians were killed during Kheibar – the number may have ...”

“... which dominated Beckett’s own household. They were bohemians. They gave parties at which, as Anthony Cronin noted in his biography of Beckett, ‘people sat on the floor and afterwards quite possibly slept on it.’ No one among the Sinclairs minded Beckett staying in bed all morning and having no worldly ambitions and many vague and high-toned ...”

“... I marry you.The embrace of the other person is haunted by the isolation it’s supposed to dispel. Cross rhyme (‘years’/‘bears’, ‘weight’/‘fate’) locks us into a fatalistic echo, as the beloved, brought close, becomes an almost unbearable burden. The clunky repetition of ‘body’ weighs down the lines, just as Schwartz imagined Gertrude would ...”

“... signed up for one, and on average only two-fifths of the people at risk do sign up. Besides, as Anthony Perry, flood-risk manager for Gloucestershire, explained, the key to the July floods was the water pouring off the Cotswolds, and the agency doesn’t give warnings for those small, nippy rivers. ‘The limitations are small watercourses, where they ...”

“... now facing the electric chair in Georgia. He had the good fortune to be represented on appeal by Anthony Amsterdam, a learned and rhetorically gifted Stanford law professor. His argument before the Supreme Court not only saved his client’s life but irrevocably changed the history of the death penalty in America, if not exactly as he might have ...”

“... Union. It’s instructive to compare the account Moore gives of this fiasco to the one provided by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe in The Blunders of Our Governments, their litany of the cock-ups of the modern British state. Even in this exalted company – the Millennium Dome, the ERM disaster – the poll tax takes pride of place, ‘the blunder to end all ...”