“... those condemned to live in fallout shadows dig and scrape. A dowser and ley line tracker called Alan Hayday, formerly employed on the assembly line of the Ford Motor Company in Dagenham, contacted me to pass on his research into a tunnel he claimed to have discovered running from Sutton House, a Tudor mansion on the ridge above the culverted Hackney ...”

“... and guards in a mock jail, took a close interest in the Iraq prison abuses when they came to light in 2004. At Stanford, guards and their clients seem to have adapted seamlessly to life in a state correctional facility, and it is no great surprise to learn that during the Saddam era, Abu Ghraib had been designed on an architectural blueprint pioneered by ...”

“... panting with the effort and looking for signs of danger.’ In his diary, he confessed to ‘a light, dry feeling of contraction, as when you stand before a man ready to punch you, waiting for the blow.’ The KPD polled 13 per cent of the vote, and was promptly proscribed by Hitler’s ascendant party. Less than a month after this, in early April, an ...”

“... strange that the poem was completed just a decade after Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’: there seem light years between Larkin’s melancholy scepticism, his urge to bring religion down to earth, and Eliot’s high-toned, abstract, prayerful urge to coax his images into some large, suggestive, mystical space. And yet there are moments in ‘Little ...”

“... figures in his life had turned his mind towards Marxism: his cousin Phyllis Kemp, and the composer Alan Bush. He signed up, albeit briefly, to the Communist Party of Great Britain before switching his allegiance from Stalin to Trotsky. British communists regarded support for Trotsky, by then expelled from the Soviet Union, as ideologically suspect, and ...”

“... though they were picked principally for their skill at chess. One of them, another Kingsman, was Alan Turing, who, with Gordon Welchman of Sidney Sussex, was foremost among those who decoded Ultra, encyphered on the Enigma machine, and, perhaps more than any single person, helped to save us from defeat in the battle of the Atlantic. When suddenly Japanese ...”

“... neoliberal economy produced personal fortunes in excess of those of the 1980s, and what would, in Alan Greenspan’s famous phrase, be described as an ‘irrationally exuberant’ art market soon roared to life. Saatchi, the standard-bearer of the 1980s boom, was an advertising executive; his counterpart in the latest upswing in the art market is a hedge-fund ...”

“... In escalating, hall-of-mirrors, Chinese-dolls Stoppardian fashion, this observation throws light on the drama from which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern springs, and which turns from being the main thing to a subplot, becoming a play within a play. The echo of ‘home’ in the title of Hamlet begins to boom.These things alone would be enough to make ...”

“... Cahun, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Hildegarde of Bingen – as if to meet a new cultural need. Alan Turing, who now has a government educational scheme named after him, was not only obscure but disgraced for more than a quarter-century after his death. Hinton isn’t of Turing’s calibre, and Blacklock doesn’t oversell him as a pioneer, though he quotes ...”

“... describes the challenges of serving the BNP as a council employee. Should he agree to send Alan rather than Abdul to service BNP councillors’ computers? Absolutely not. What should be done when the BNP issued leaflets accusing the council of employment discrimination in favour of Asians? He should tell the BNP that they were wrongly claiming the ...”

“... sinister memories; and Penda’s Fen (1974), a collaboration between David Rudkin and the director Alan Clarke in which a repressed Midlands schoolboy’s visions of Edward Elgar and King Penda threaten to unlock the secrets of his own sexuality. All of these productions are considered at length in The Magic Box, Rob Young’s hefty survey of occult British ...”

“... hours, simple things, chords – really annoying stuff … She’d pull the curtains across and light candles around her and do this funereal singing all day long.’ The music manager Danny Fields was at her debut solo gig: she was ‘like a child discovering a musical instrument for the first time. She would just press one note and bend her ear toward the ...”

“... Prima gave birth to a second daughter in 1962 and not long afterwards married the actor and model Alan Marlowe: he was queer, ‘a man I’d never fall in love with, so he seemed like a good person to marry’. Together they founded the New York Poets Theatre (they also had two children). Di Prima wrote plays, acted, directed and produced. They put on dramas ...”

“... It’s a theory with which one could quarrel, or debate, in many cases, but it certainly casts a light both on literary texts and (again) on drawings and paintings. Furthermore Wack has provided eighty pages of little-known Latin text and facing-page translation, thrusting forward the evidence for anyone who wants to argue. And who can argue with the thought ...”

“... Again, his eye for detail strengthens his argument. The manhauling of heavy naval (as against light Inuit) sledges was one of the most deadly flaws in the Navy’s methods of Arctic exploration. Strangely, to the English there was something noble, something romantic, about strong young men marching in harness through the Arctic wastes, enduring ...”