“... who had photographed Joy Division in 1979, too, beside an industrial estate in Stockport – took some shots for Sounds of The Smiths standing in the ruins of Central Station, once the pride of the Midland Railway Company but by then a rackety and pockmarked car park. These bands didn’t seem all that interested in commercial success, but they were ...”

“... of invalidism. The 18-year-old Bradley – strong, confident and hungry for responsibility – took care of her eldest niece, eventually becoming her legal guardian. Bradley and Cooper spent the rest of their lives together. Having no need to work or marry for money, they devoted themselves to travel, study and art. (Amy, the second Cooper daughter, seems ...”

“... but a guy liked to have good hair. Then some magic descended on him, and the magician was John Huston, who wrote the script for High Sierra (1941). It’s the story of a veteran gangster, Roy Earle, who wants peace and a new life. But as he comes out of prison, the girl he likes dumps him and he’s on the hook for one more job. Huston saw him ...”

“... society which was monochrome, buttoned-up and circumscribed, but fundamentally benign and (to use John Major’s celebrated phrase) ‘at ease with itself’. That ease was, of course, predicated on the exclusion and silencing of certain social groups: there are almost no people of colour in Ealing films – or in many British films of the 1950s, for that ...”

“... Tudor writers​ made being a court fool sound like a holiday. In John Heywood’s play Witty and Witless (c.1520s), ordinary working men are said to live with great ‘payne of body’: they strain their muscles ‘plowyng’, ‘cartyng’, ‘hedgyng and dychyng’, exposed all year round to the weather. ‘Some yn wynter fryse, some yn somer fry ...”

“... like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’.3 (And, in ...”

“... somewhat brittle voice, occasionally grated’. She was the first-born child of the Boston mayor, John Francis ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald, a ‘paunchy welterweight’ as Nasaw calls him, who belted out ‘Sweet Adeline’ at every campaign gathering and kept his daughter on a short leash. Rose returned home from convent school in 1910 to become her ...”

“... knew his online life would be the one to read when it came to the puzzle of why he killed. But he took the extra precaution of printing out his manifesto and taking it with him to the college. He made the students gather in the middle of the room, chose one of them – ‘the lucky one’, he called him – and gave him a package containing the manifesto and ...”

“... a great deal of unostentatious heroism.’ It was here that plans for putting Ruskin into practice took shape: a school and workshop where the teachers would work in the shop and recruit the pupils to it. The School and Guild of Handicraft was opened in 1888 in a rented workshop in Commercial Street. The moment was opportune. Philanthropically, because money ...”

“... market, driven by fantastic new technologies such as radio and aviation, rose steadily and then took off into the stratosphere. RCA stock went from $85 in 1928 to $549 in September 1929. Then, of course, it all collapsed. The stock market crash did not cause the Great Depression, but the two became inextricably linked in the popular imagination. Fraser ...”

“... he has no respect at all. Take the case of Lorraine and Peter Landau, a couple in Northwood, who took time from what one presumes was a busy schedule to write to Rupert, having seen him in The Vortex, to comment on ‘the audibility of my performance in rather pompous terms’. Rupert opened the letter while ‘deeply hungover from a Tuesday night at the ...”

“... not as unfair as you think,’ advised an experienced French colleague. Accreditation took a few minutes from South Vietnam and, separately, from the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, whose boss, General William Westmoreland, had the Shakespearean sounding title of COMUSMACV. (In the flesh, Westy came over more as a hard-driving ...”

“... this deadpan claim to literary originality: Swift lifted these words from the Restoration poet Sir John Denham’s praise of Abraham Cowley: ‘To him no author was unknown,/Yet what he wrote was all his own.’ As it happens, it was Cowley’s rhapsodic style Swift began his career by imitating, so that (he bragged to a cousin in 1692) ‘when I writt what ...”

“... of The Last English Poachers, written by Bob, his son Brian (also a poacher) and a ghost called John McDonald, is more punk than its predecessors’. The Robin Hood aspect is to the fore. The Toveys see themselves as the rural frontline in the class war, and their book is full of contempt for rural toffs, or ‘ya-yas’, also called ‘saddle-bumpers’ by ...”

“... effects, unsullied on this occasion by the use of the first person and the other mannerisms that took over early and hardened with time. One of his chief gifts is to atomise and reorganise letters, words, punctuation and parts of speech, and in that way disrupt our habituated ways of reading for meaning. By forcing the eye to move in unexpected ways he ...”