“... and the country. And whenever we think ministers cannot sink any lower, they do: the proposal to x-ray the teeth and skeletons of underage asylum-seekers to see whether they are in fact children (and thus eligible for more generous treatment) is scarcely believable. The anti-terror legislation has only turned the screw. Although terror is a problem partly of ...”

“... Fair in New York City, the wilder half of the Perry Lane crowd was on the bus too, and the man at the wheel was Neal Cassady, the legendary long-distance driver of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Stone was part of the Perry Lane crowd, but when the hijinks began to eat into his writing time he slipped away. Kesey’s voyage east with the Merry Pranksters ...”

“... Duke Ellington’s ten-man group of 1927-32 was billed for a time as the Jungle Band, a title in keeping with the Southern plantation/Afro-Deco interior and exotic-erotic floor shows of the Cotton Club, the grandest Harlem venue (it seated more than six hundred), where Ellington performed, before whites only, for the five years from 1927, and in the spring seasons of 1933, 1937 and 1938 ...”

“... who ‘stretched out like a cat, and rolled/The bitterish taste of beer upon his tongue’. Or the man in ‘Modes of Pleasure’ whose triumphs ‘recurred/In different rooms without a word’, but now, older, he sits rigid, ‘brave, terrible,/The will awaits its gradual end.’ Gunn, born in 1929, studied at Cambridge before he fled England for California ...”

“... Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old lady came to know this is a mystery, and how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than ...”

“... as it dribbled between his legs, bending down, in the timeless phrase of one journalist, ‘like a man on the crapper trying to get to the telephone’. Ray Knight scored from third for the Mets, and downstairs in the Red Sox changing area Costas watched the staff unpeeling clingfilm from the lockers before the distraught ...”

“... for their votes on planning and rezoning issues. Among the worst offenders was the overbearing Ray Burke, a former minister, who was eventually jailed for tax evasion, but had earlier pocketed almost £3 million when he sold his family home to the property developers Flynn and O’Flaherty. The lavish lifestyle of Charles Haughey, the former Fianna Fáil ...”

“... take another number. That fantasy took me as comfortably as it was possible to be through a death-ray session. Once or twice, to see a doctor and to have blood taken, the Poet and I took our seats, and became one with the silent mass of cancer patients and their friends or family. I often tried to go past without looking, but it was impossible. I tried ...”

“... gang in town’ machismo. Phillips evokes the great ‘punk icon’ Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex as an exceptional forerunner, but Phillips’s vision of punk has, in essence, been replanted and redreamed in America in a dozen different varieties: hardcore, straight edge, Riot Grrrl etc. This is punk rock as shorthand for a whole ...”

“... of the most charismatic American technoscientific Thought Leaders. The influential futurologist Ray Kurzweil has put himself down for freezing at the Arizona plant, and the MIT engineer Marvin Minsky, one of the great figures in artificial intelligence, is on Alcor’s scientific advisory board. Minsky likens embracing cryonic preservation to Pascal’s ...”

“... the stern and reactionary Gregory XVI. The old pope had died at the age of eighty; the new man, who adopted the name Pius IX, was 54, with a warm personality and a cheerful, winning manner. Whereas Gregory had begun his reign in 1831 with a campaign of violent repression, Pius’s first official act was to proclaim a blanket amnesty for the political ...”

“... problematic, not to say question-begging. No physician can pop a thermometer into the brain or X-ray the heart. Whatever its nature or function, pain is felt. As Rey observes, it is best conceived of not as a raw physical sensation but as an experience (feeling filtered through culture). Not least, the dubious desire among nonsense medics to distinguish ...”

“... to be as much as 90 per cent of the work, each epic could easily have been composed by one man, but really it was, as Vico had suggested, the work of a whole people, who had been rehearsing it for generations, with hundreds of years to get it right. The Black Stone had not come from nowhere. Homer was a mere pinnacle projecting above the surface, part ...”

“... son, and selling newspapers and making marmalade for the WSPU. When Asquith suddenly announced a man-only suffrage bill in November of that year, reneging yet again on a commitment to women, she turned to direct action. Her subsequent hunger strikes, and refusal to accept fluids, in Armley jail in Leeds nearly killed her. After her husband bombarded the Home ...”

“... of the pits in Ashington, Northumberland fairly represents her distinctive voice: Ashington man was the archetypal proletarian, the arehetypal patriarch ... As in the Army and the Stock Exchange, men’s companionship did not produce social cohesion; if fostered power and privilege for men within their own class and community ... No day matched Sunday ...”