“... this century’s crop already included Russ McDonald’s Shakespeare’s Late Style (2006), Gordon McMullan’s Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing (2007) and a Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Last Plays edited by Catherine Alexander (2009). If there is something intriguingly late aesthetically about these plays, there is also something ...”

“... music, but there’s only one actual song on the CD, the perversely catchy ‘Celebrity’ (‘Go Gordon/Go Ramsay/Go Beyoncé/Go Beyoncé…’). So how is it supposed to work? Protest dance pop seems as unlikely a proposition as protest chamber music. Complicating the old debate about whether art can serve a political agenda is the still older debate about ...”

“... end and more than four thousand people drowned. The thin-moustached villain of the film was Bruce Ismay, director of the White Star Line, who according to the script insisted that the ineffective Captain Smith, emblem of Britain’s exaggerated sense of its seafaring skill, drive his ship at full speed through an icefield so it could set a transatlantic ...”

“... the family. There was Uncle Clarence’s death at Ypres: the telegraph boy riding his bike along Bruce Street in 1917, and women stood fearfully on their doorsteps to see which door he would knock at. There was Mam, working upstairs at Stylo Shoes in Briggate in 1926, watching mounted police charge the strikers. There was the outbreak of war in September ...”

“... Petrie notes that Radio Free Scotland, the famous pirate radio station run throughout the 1960s by Gordon Wilson, Wolfe’s successor as party leader, hinted at ‘an equivalence between the situation in Scotland and the position prevailing in the communist states of Eastern Europe’.Petrie is not saying that the SNP simply stole unionism’s clothes. All ...”

“... Turner notes that the words and melody of ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ were lifted from a song by Gordon Jenkins, who reached an out-of-court settlement with Cash in the late 1960s. ‘Ring of Fire’, ‘Boy Named Sue’ and ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’ were all written by others; likewise, cover versions of Cash’s songs are often an improvement on the ...”

“... the conical elevation of Stave Hill. The seductive ‘Plan of the London Mounds’ in Elizabeth Gordon’s Prehistoric London (1914) showed a triangulation between the Llandin (Parliament Hill), the Penton Mound (the site of the New River reservoir), Bryn Gwyn (at the Tower of London) and Tothill (Westminster). Here, at the cult centre of the emerging ...”

“... Charlie Hebdo, but also Anna Akhmatova and Flannery O’Connor. His interests include football, Bruce Springsteen and the city of Lyon, where he grew up. He takes judo seriously enough to have written a book about it. He is an obsessive cyclist: he claims that it is when cycling that the choice of films becomes clear to him. While the invited members of the ...”

“... president of United Biscuits, which gave £632,500 to the Party during the Thatcher years); Sir Gordon White (head of the US arm of Hanson, which gave £652,000 to the Tories and £100,000 to the Centre for Policy Studies in 1981-90); Sir Jeffrey Sterling (head of P & O, which gave £370,000 during the Thatcher years); Peter Palumbo (Chairman of the Arts ...”

“... inside everyone who has lived in London for a few years, like the Incredible Hulk lurking inside Bruce Banner, and I found myself wondering how much they’d be worth if they were sold for housing. From the day the Metropolitan began snaking into the shires people have been looking out of train windows, thinking such thoughts. It’s how the suburbs were ...”

“... the slum landlords’ petty exploitations and the demolition-happy dogma of the state. In 1963, Bruce Kenrick – who would a few years later set up the homelessness charity Shelter, just as the nation was absorbing the shock of Cathy Come Home, Ken Loach’s film about homelessness – founded the Notting Hill Housing Trust, which today, as the Notting ...”