“... for what seemed to us a second-best girlfriend, the dark-haired ‘girl next door’, Mary Jane Watson, a mere glass of beer – the champagne of Gwen Stacy was not for the likes of us. So, Karl and I resented Spider-Man like we resented the Beatles, for being such lavish evidence we’d been born too late. The 1970s adventures were overly reverent, full of ...”

“... one-piece swimsuit at the beach, looking as if he’s quietly enjoying himself – a more winsome George Costanza. These memes are surely made by people who had to study Adorno at university. They will probably have read the depressive aphorisms of Minima Moralia and some fragments from Dialectic of Enlightenment on the ‘culture industry’; a few ...”

“... and her imaginary husbands in the Steventon marriage register, for which her father, the Rev. George Austen, was responsible (both ‘Henry Frederic Howard Fitzwilliam of London’ and ‘Edmund Arthur William Mortimer of Liverpool’ feature as husband to ‘Jane Austen of Steventon’).In January 1796, Austen wrote to Cassandra about Thomas Lefroy, the ...”

“... but does its value lie as much in admonition as in tribute? According to the late ecologist Adam Watson, Shepherd was ‘a snob towards most working-class folk’. In a 2016 review, he described The Living Mountain as ‘fanciful, contrived and fundamentally anthropocentric’ and complained that ‘she did not know the Braemar area or its folk ...”

“... The last monarch​ to have a funeral at Westminster Abbey was George II in 1760. It was the first time chairs were set out for an audience. Horace Walpole recorded that the duke of Newcastle arrived weeping noisily and pretended to faint. When the archbishop of Canterbury offered him smelling salts, the duke leaped up and ran around the church with a spyglass to see who ‘was or was not there ...”

“... in common between, say, Ulysses, Der Rosenkavalier, the ‘Donna Velata’ and Donatello’s St George in virtue of which they are all works of art? As if that were not hard enough, try adding prints, films, dances and buildings and the problem becomes intractable. Yet traditionally the aim of aesthetics has been to undertake an abstraction from the ...”

“... as a 15-year-old, on learning that the Captain of my house, the immensely talented Paul Graham-Watson, had been killed by guerrilla forces in the Malayan jungle, that my friend George Ponsonby had been killed in an armoured-car accident in BAOR, and that Tony Pugh and Nick Wadham had been killed flying with the RAF on ...”

“... mechanical, and can seem repellent. Conan Doyle may have identified with Sherlock Holmes and with Watson too, as most of us do, but this is very different from turning oneself into a technique, identifying with a method. Greene’s particular brand of Roman Catholicism becomes a vital part of it, and the part in which the higher self-indulgence is most on ...”

“... his Australian friends as ‘David’, was (like ‘David Peterley’) an associate of a certain George Billam in founding the Turret Repertory Theatre in Sydney, and (like ‘David Peterley’ again) helped set up a financial rescue-organisation for Brennan, who was down on his luck and would sometimes be found lying drunk in the gutter. A letter from ...”

“... and its puzzling relationship with the Thing – the Establishment. Take the case of Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, an eminent chemist, a progressive Whig in his politics and a champion of the equalisation of church revenues, yet who also issued An Apology for Christianity (1776) when he entered the lists against Gibbon. To what extent were Court ...”

“... A scattering of dissident voices on the payroll – Seumas Milne, Owen Jones, Zoe Williams, George Monbiot – were drowned out by a host of detractors, from within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose ...”

“... two worlds that have been conquested by the military of the revolution. The revolution belongs to George Washington, the Russians, the Chinese. But before that, there is Manson. I have 17 years before China. I can’t explain that to where you can understand it.’ Neither can I. Guinn explains a lot in his usefully linear book. The standard Manson ...”

“... historical blur) often with great vividness. The three men, Thomas Evans, Robert Wedderburn and George Cannon, were affiliated with ultra-radicalism and Spence before the letter’s death in 1814 – though Cannon, almost a generation younger than the others, was a late arrival. The first part of Dr McCalman’s study looks at the preparatory stages of the ...”

“... at the Electric Cinema, Bradford. Come the talkies, she turns housekeeper and now looks after a Mr Watson, sometime chairman of the Bradford Dyers’ Association, who is a widower with a fancy woman, whom Aunt Eveline dislikes because she has dyed hair and is not Aunt Eveline. On Sundays there are musical evenings in the front room at Gilpin Place. The ...”

“... made him both the founder of modern molecular biology (or, in Francis Crick’s words, his and Watson’s ‘scientific grandfather’) and, through his enormously influential The Social Function of Science, the theorist of science planning and science policy. Cambridge was his base until in 1938 he took over P.M.S. Blackett’s chair of physics at ...”