“... of Generation X were being weighed down by the accumulating debris of mass culture.Simon Reynolds started writing for Melody Maker in 1985. He was 22 at the time, making him a young baby boomer, but one, as he puts it, ‘heavily creased by Generation X’s crippling irony and feelings of futility’. Though Oxford-educated and far from a ...”

“... the ‘fair oak’ situated at the back of the playing space – while the magician-astrologer Simon Forman claimed to have seen Macbeth and Banquo ‘riding through a wood’, rather than a ‘blasted heath’, before meeting ‘three women fairies’ at the beginning of Macbeth. There is nothing in Shakespeare’s text to indicate any such spectacle; and ...”

“... as history has become more popular both on the page and on the screen. The doyen of TV historians, Simon Schama, is in a league of his own and his political viewpoint not in the forefront, but the new breed of historian – Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Norman Stone – all came to prominence under Mrs Thatcher and share some of her ...”

“... that she be given a non-custodial sentence, so it came as a shock when, on 5 March 2018, Sheriff David Pender jailed her for sixteen months.Katie’s childhood had been as stable as William’s was volatile. She and her younger brother grew up in a semi-detached house on the southern edge of Glasgow, with their parents, Stuart, a data analyst, and Linda, a ...”

“... last year of the South East Fermanagh Foundation, a prominent Northern Irish victims’ group, David Hallawell, the son of a police officer killed by the IRA, said that ‘innocent victims and survivors have been betrayed and forgotten … for the sake of the government and votes on the mainland.’The main point of contention is that the offer of ...”

“... art more pernicious to men than all the ills it pretends to cure’. But no one who follows Simon Schama’s advice helpfully prescribed in the blurb – ‘take a dose of the book at least once a day and retire early to bed’ – will sleep easy. In fact, two narratives are here in constant tension. One is an up to date, deeply informed, but ...”

“... at the time of the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, when ‘700,000 Jews’, in the words of David Ben-Gurion, were ‘pitted against 27 million Arabs – one against forty’ and the US joined a UN arms embargo on the region despite the fact that the Arab armies had a clear advantage in terms of weaponry. Even the CIA and the US Secretary of State ...”

“... The most notable New York venues in that era were probably the Sanctuary and the Loft, home to DJ David Mancuso. Saturday Night For Ever includes some enthusiastic reminiscences of the gay scene in London: the drugs, the songs and the very late nights. The camp, glam impulses behind the upsurge in gay clubbing influenced the image of disco in the ...”

“... Dylan’s ‘barbed-wire tonsils’ (Ian Hamilton’s words), his ‘voice like sand and glue’ (David Bowie’s). ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, Ricks says in his chapter on ‘Pride’, is saved ‘from being – in all its vituperative exhilaration – even more damnably proud than the person whom it damns and blasts . . . There can be felt in the refrain an ...”

“... from him some three thousand pages of material for memoranda – Bunche called him the ‘Swedish Simon Legree’. Myrdal also liked baiting Southern sheriffs and mayors by appearing with Bunche in tow, afterwards going on to the best hotel in town while his assistant sought hospitality from whichever Black minister or schoolmaster would put him up. More than ...”

“... ask these things, of course. The tone is judicious, though an outburst of ritual name-calling from David Jordan belies the subtlety of his longer study, The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre. For him, Robespierre is ‘unworldly, resentful, vain, egotistical, susceptible to flattery, contemptuous of or indifferent to all the social pleasures ...”

“... according to Monbiot the educational charity Sense about Science – a prominent supporter of Simon Singh in his recent dispute with the British Chiropractic Association – has a former LMer for a managing director, and another one as her deputy; the director of the Science Media Centre is Fiona Fox, a former LM contributor and younger sister of Claire ...”

“... to peel off the catsuit in her marital bed. For her first Rolling Stone cover, aged seventeen, David LaChapelle shot her in a bra and hot pants, one arm around a Teletubby doll. Lynne was horrified; Britney asked LaChapelle to direct her next video. In this period she seemed both omnipotent and obedient, a chronic people-pleaser at the centre of her own ...”

“... criminal underworld, it belongs to it.’ (Khadzhiev’s own reputation, it must be said, is not simon-pure.) ‘Whether or not the Dudayev Government directly profited from the arms trade,’ Handelman adds judiciously, ‘it made little effort to stop the business ... the timing of the Chechen gangs’ transformation from small bands involved in petty ...”

“... meetings were hugely popular during their visits to Britain in the 1870s and 1880s, leading David Bebbington to make the startling claim that ‘Moody and Sankey probably represent the chief cultural influence of the United States on Britain during the 19th century.’ Of course, if one really took seriously the criterion about having ‘in some way ...”