“... for having lost a note his mother once left in his lunchbox by breaking the glass on Dad’s John Coltrane poster, and Dad understands. The book’s emotional landscape may be desolate but it is fully energised. The sections flit from parable to skit to list, with sudden swerves, so that an odd dark fable about fraternal conflict ends as an exam ...”

“... Bill, where he studied English and edited the Daily Bruin (Watergate conspirators Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were his arch-enemies on the paper). By then, he’d already been part of the Allied occupation of Germany pulling bodies out of the rubble, gone AWOL to attend the Nuremberg Trials (with the intention of assassinating Hermann Göring) and worked ...”

“... Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan ...”

“... any longer cared to try for this sort of thing. Lawrence Gowing, writing of a painting by Thomas Jones who was in Rome a century and a half earlier, explains: ‘The normal way of gathering information about nature is in a drawing, but this oil sketch is nothing like a drawing. It is based not on line but on solid colour matched in value and hue to visual ...”

“... this sickly interlude U and I was a return to form. The book explored Baker’s relationship with John Updike, as writerly model, father figure to be challenged, and occasional sharer of the same physical space (the two men’s passing encounters couldn’t be said to constitute even acquaintance). U and I reduced Updike’s work to a mulch of remembered ...”

“... extensive knowledge. When he wants to tell us what a good scholar Housman was, he quotes the late John Carter’s comment on the testimonials supplied by various scholars when Housman was candidate for the Chair of Latin at University College, London. ‘Perhaps only those conversant with the trades-union of Academe,’ wrote Carter, ‘can appreciate to the ...”

“... informativeness test. I don’t at all share his optimism. Someone who finds it unsurprising that John understands that bachelors are bachelors might, I suppose, still wonder whether John understands that bachelors are unmarried men. So it appears that if, following Peacocke’s recipe, you substitute ‘unmarried ...”

“... Pasmore – there were more eccentric talents of various sizes, like Stanley Spencer and David Jones, who were very English (or very Welsh) and not international at all. In drawings of wrapped sculpture in landscape and moonstruck megaliths Moore and Paul Nash gave even Surrealism an English edge. You could find evidence of deep-rooted native ...”

“... Those Englishmen most likely to sympathise with the new arrivals, whether Chartists like Ernest Jones or George Jacob Harney, ‘advanced’ publicists like G.H. Lewes or G.J. Holyoake, or even established writers like Carlyle or John Stuart Mill, had limited means and little patronage. But most new arrivals found that ...”

“... to stunned resignation. A scattering of dissident voices on the payroll – Seumas Milne, Owen Jones, Zoe Williams, George Monbiot – were drowned out by a host of detractors, from within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan ...”

“... reverted to resembling, in the American mind, something far worse than partes infidelium. The John Birch Society, an important orchestrator of American paranoia in the 1950s, was named for an American missionary who had supposedly been martyred by the Reds. Indeed, the Cold War and McCarthyite atmosphere in the United States was attributable much more to ...”

“... with angina. He was probably deterred from making this known by fear for his revered teacher, John Hunter, who was already suffering from the condition and was shortly to die of it. The irascible Hunter was said to have keeled over during an argument with a colleague. ‘My life is in the hands of any fool who cares to upset me,’ he had said awhile ...”

“... place before he was born. He was the great-grandchild of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones, and was thus connected with both the Kipling and the Baldwin families; he was the grandson of an Oxford Professor of Poetry (of no great distinction, it must be admitted); and the son of Angela Thirkell, the novelist of upper-class English life, and James ...”

“... the help he got from Gamlin. Forbes wrote to him at the BBC – at the time Forbes’s name was John Theobald Clarke – and Gamlin wrote back, telling Forbes that his letter was so extraordinary he would have to meet him. When they met Gamlin said it would be necessary for him to change his name. ‘Another young actor, ahead of me,’ Forbes wrote years ...”

“... the cards were the sameSuch intimacy comes at the expense of her relationship with her partner, John, since as a male he can’t be allowed to trespass onto territory that seems oddly sacred, given that it represents the violation of body and will. If he crossed that boundary, ‘my reply could only be an outburst, could only be Fuck you, this is not ...”