“... tells EU: it’s war.’ ‘There’s been nothing like it since the Falklands,’ crowed Norman Tebbit on his weekly page. Much anti-foreigner fun was had in Wapping: burn German flags, quote Churchill to German tourists. Major was portrayed in Beefeater costume; the paper offered posters, car suckers, free beefburgers. ‘Steer we go steer we ...”

“... from great movies: the likes of Richard Blaine and Ilsa Lund, George Bailey, Travis Bickle and Norman Bates, who turn out, in the interstices of the entries, to have entangled lives and a dark plot all of their own. If only Howard Hawks wasn’t dead and had made a movie of Suspects we could all die happy and go to deconstruction heaven. Though the ...”

“... knee breeks black silk stockings high heeled shoes with large buckles, blue coat, yellow vest white neck cloth with stiffner and frilled shirt – he is one of the Queen Ann folks’. The pretty brick so-called Queen Anne style of the 1870s which Thomson thus mocked was the architecture of a perplexed generation. Invented largely by ex-assistants of Sir ...”

“... writer of prose, and after the Second World War, every male contender – William Styron, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, James Jones, Joseph Heller – had done some service and wanted to write literary masterpieces filled with the perfumes of combat.* It is only in more recent times that the task of writing novels about battle has fallen chiefly to bad ...”

“... a visit to Greenwich fair. On her honeymoon in America, she attended a fancy dress ball at the White House as an Arab maiden with golden coins in her hair. But though she adored the fictional stereotype of the Oriental princess, she disliked the condition of contemporary Algerian women. Her refined Unitarian instincts rebelled against the social and ...”

“... and acoustic torture. Guest star status at literary festivals with cover-quote acclaim from Norman Mailer. Heavily publicised trials confirming the integrity of an outrageous product, Howl or Naked Lunch, soon followed. Splicing, sorting and retyping binges carried out by willing accomplices – Sinclair Beiles, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory ...”

“... brilliant criminal and the subject of one of the great pieces of modern American writing, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. Gilmore forswore further appeals and faced the firing squad wearing his famously indestructible Timex watch: scarcely typical and followed by a mere trickle of other deaths. There were no executions in 1978 or 1980, one ...”

“... into quiet conversation. Ice-cream kiss of almond blossom, bridal abundance of cherry: pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ...”

“... Lance Richardson speculates that they may have discussed poetry. Both men were protégés of Norman Holmes Pearson, an instructor in the English department at Yale. Pearson was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his pupil, who had taken his own life earlier in 1950 under a ...”

“... wave-line may wait to fall,yet (waiting for its falling)still the wind may take,from off its crest,white flake on flake of foam,that risesseeming to dart and pulseand rend the light,so my mind hesitatesabove the passionquivering yet to break[…]will the sound break at lastas the wave hesitant,or will the whole night passand I lie listening awake?H.D.’s ...”

“... can be divided into three distinct periods: the first period was from their settlement with the Norman Conquest untill their expulsion from England in 1290; the middle period ends with unofficial toleration under Cromwell in 1655, when England was nominally Judenrein, although many individual Jews did make their way there; the last period shows the Jews in ...”

“... Third Policeman. How far Father Tebbit actually travelled in his quest for employment is unclear. Norman was born in Ponders End and elected to Parliament as the member for Chingford, a distance of about three miles. Ponders End is more of a transport collision than a settlement and nobody needs much political arm-twisting to move on. Probably the best ...”

“... or persuade.’ Hitler was dead, he concluded, but ‘the poison has not disappeared’, and ‘white civilisation … is as responsible for its perversions as for its successes.’Camus used his North American tour to audition ideas he would later develop in L’Homme révolté (The Rebel), a critique of revolutionary violence published in 1951. Speaking ...”

“... made him a lasting poet, as he must have known.The breakthrough begins with his 1949 volume, The White Threshold, and was consolidated in his most famous work, the long poem ‘The Nightfishing’, included in the volume of that title in 1955. Both collections, published by Faber, had been signed up by T.S. Eliot, who would prove a wise and supportive ...”

“... in 1960s London, and his grandfather, Bruno, was one of the principal designers of the White City estate in northern Berlin, one of a cluster of social housing projects from the Weimar era to be given a Unesco World Heritage listing. It is a commonplace that modern architecture in Britain, as an ideology, was an import from interwar Central Europe ...”