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“... Joseph P. Kennedy. Jacobs paraphrases the Rat Pack’s foreign minister without portfolio, Dean Martin: ‘Wops, nigs, hebes, what the fuck was the difference? We were all up against the wall and fucking well better stick together.’As with Elvis Presley and Charlie Parker, you feel Destiny’s real leg-up was provided by the ferocious will of Sinatra’s ...”

“... played a part in the failure to convict Tony’s killers. In 1997, the alleged IRA getaway driver Martin McGartland published a memoir, Fifty Dead Men Walking, in which he admitted to having been an undercover agent working for RUC Special Branch; the book’s blurb claims that the information he passed on saved the lives of ‘at least fifty ...”

“... the essential, the thrilling thing was to ‘smack the pansies down’. The period covered by Peter Parker’s astonishing two-volume compilation culminates in the pansies’ at least partial vindication, the long deferred passage of the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations into law in 1967. Together these books present for the first time an assemblage ...”

“... For anyone with a teenage daughter their scabrous subject-matter is hard to take. They would scare Martin Amis. It needed a true appreciation of literary talent to spot their quality. The same true appreciation ensures that the prose in the LRB rarely falls below a certain standard and that the level of argument is kept up. Not all of the best LRB writers are ...”

“... is merely bored. This occurs with many of the poets in Michael Schmidt’s anthology, for though Peter Scupham, Jeremy Hooker, Jeffrey Wainwright, Dick Davies and John Ash are all highly talented and painstaking artists, they seem to be fashioning their poems for themselves and each other. As Auden and Eliot showed, ‘difficult’ poetry can still be ...”

“... Yassin. In between those two events, in 1947, the Irgun captured two British sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, both National Service conscripts, and then hanged them, leaving their bodies booby-trapped. There was a spasm of rage in England, where two Jewish Labour MPs expressed their ‘shame and humiliation’, and the Jewish Chronicle said that ...”

“... him in America in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which is more pungently caught in the oral biography Peter Manso produced in 1985, yet Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it ...”

“... polls predicted (as usual) but no better in seats won. Only 20 seats changed hands – or 21 if Martin Bell’s old seat of Tatton is included. The Conservatives had the largest turnover – winning nine seats but losing eight. Labour was the biggest loser over all – it lost eight and won two – and the Liberal Democrats gained the most, losing two and ...”

“... view of Shakespeare’s national allegiance was eloquently summed up by another Philadelphian, Peter Markoe, in 1786: Monopolising Britain! Boast no more His genius to your narrow bounds confin’d; Shakespeare’s bold spirit seeks our western shore, A gen’ral blessing for the world design’d, And, emulous to form the rising age, The noblest Bard ...”

“... head, more in sadness than anything else. ‘No,’ he answered. I later discovered his identity: Martin Schulz, now running against Angela Merkel. As he put it back in October, when president of the European Parliament: ‘I refuse to imagine a Europe where lorries and hedge funds are free to cross borders but citizens are not.’ Liam Fox resigned on 14 ...”

“... and unconvinced, marred in their judgments by a ‘fatal distaste for self-criticism’, as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet who ...”

“... exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, and Tynemarch did not return my call. But here is what Martin Kane, Severn Trent’s director of customer relations, said in an interview with Radio Gloucestershire shortly after the floods: ‘The risk of flood defences being breached at the Mythe was – I think it was something like a one in a thousand chance of ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”

“... all return after the revolution, when automation has eliminated drudgery and we shall live as Peter Pans in paradise. It’s the totality for ‘kids’ because children already know life without boredom, constraints, separation – some of the time at least, mostly when they’re at play rather than detained in school. ‘There are no limits to ...”

“... of Germany, worked with think tanks such as the Bertelsmann Stiftung, and labour experts such as Peter Hartz (the later disgraced HR boss of VW), to devise a new model of labour market management and welfare. As Schöllgen’s biography reveals, in the minds of Schröder and his entourage, this programme of reforms became linked over the winter of 2002-3 ...”