“... started weirding-out the crowd at the Mitre with stories of pickled sexual organs floating in mason jars and when the Catholic bartender wanted you burned for blasphemy. We made it out of Norwich’s psychedelic underworld alive and intact, but these are different times. You always wrote whipsong fiction and Black Dogs is not different, but I’m ...”

“... trade at its worst. Even the device of undergirding, or frapping, popularised by the apostle Paul when in trouble off Crete, was still in use – running cables under the keel and tightening them to hold the hull together. The decrepit 74-gun Blenheim was so ‘wretchedly hogged’ that the builders strongly remonstrated against her putting to ...”

“... on a courtesy visit to the USSR, as it then was, in 1988, a party which included Craig Raine, Paul Bailey and Timothy Mo. I don’t remember laughing more on any trip before or since; we were a very silly group, so much so that we often mystified our hosts and sometimes behaved disgracefully. Sue – and I even noticed this in the photo the Guardian used ...”

“... evidence as to his age and appearance was contradictory. More than 130 suspects are listed in Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner’s authoritative The Jack the Ripper A to Z (1991). Curtis claims that Ripperologists have ‘brought us no closer to the real culprit than did the exertions of Scotland Yard in 1888’, but he is unduly dismissive of ...”

“... their politics militant. I claim this to be the first piece about the salience of Scargill, though Paul Routledge of the Times had, it turned out, done a decent report on the election results as they occurred. In a few months such claims were moot. Scargill led a mass picket of miners to the Saltley coke depot outside Birmingham, recruited the support of the ...”

“... not so ingrained in our counterparts abroad). Much as, in Rosemary Hill’s words, a 17th-century mason, ‘however skilled, had a status roughly on a par with a farmer’, musicians were not scholars and gentlemen until the age of Stanford, Parry and Elgar.The practical effect of this class distinction was to delay until the late 19th century any hope of ...”

“... can detect echoes of his jaundiced vision in Jordan Peele’s recent horror film, Get Out, and in Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout. But, as if it were his destiny to remain just beyond the pale of literary approval, Himes, unlike Baldwin, flunks the contemporary ‘woke’ test. As much as he deplored the prejudices of the black bourgeoisie and aligned ...”

“... that her presence saved the lives of the other staff on several occasions. Norman Cigar and Paul Williams argue that war crimes prosecutions are necessary not simply for the well-rehearsed reasons – ending cultures of impunity, achieving ‘closure’, restoring faith in due process – but because they seek to establish individual responsibility ...”

“... ills.Could the left have defended a Lexit? The idea was floated by journalists like Owen Jones and Paul Mason in the early days of the campaign. Both quickly retreated when they realised that the mainstream left had nothing positive to say to its constituencies. They felt that supporting Brexit in the context of a campaign dominated by ...”

“... A miser, a churl, a griper.’ Johnson revised his Dictionary in 1773. In 1801 George Mason published a Supplement to Johnson’s English Dictionary: of which the palpable errors are attempted to be rectified and its material omissions supplied. H. J. Todd published a revised edition in five volumes in 1818, and R. G. Latham published a revision ...”

“... in Ravenna. His monument had been restored many times over the centuries and, on this occasion, a mason working on the latest renovation accidentally dislodged a stone and out tumbled a wooden box labelled Dantis ossa with the date of 1677. Much bafflement ensued. The most likely explanation is that the Florentines had long ago sent grave robbers in the hope ...”

“... less important as a signifier of classiness. (I was pleased to discover that, 23 years apart, Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono both chose John Lennon’s ‘Beautiful Boy’ as their favourite record.)Despite its slightly lacklustre start, Desert Island Discs picked up a following and ran for 67 episodes before being mothballed in 1946 after BBC radio was ...”

“... the flag in public. They agreed that you would ‘get jumped’ in Detroit, but not south of the Mason-Dixon line, and not in Maine or New Hampshire, which are ‘different’. I stifled the impulse to say that we were from the North and that the Confederacy was the enemy in the war we’d won, or that someone who wore the symbol of American white supremacy ...”

“... and most pervasive form of American mass culture’, playing to audiences on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. For some cultural historians, America is founded on the original sin of genocide; for Rogin, the sin is slavery. Blackface is a product of European imperialism and worse – a shocking form of dehumanisation, a vampire rite in which one people ...”

“... a subterranean lake. Under the influence of Duman, and exploiting the practical skills of Sophie Mason, a garden artist and landscaper, and the person who recognised that they would need a bucket and rope to remove the soil, the collective assembled tables of archaeological finds, trophies of former lives: the usual broken clay pipes, bits of ...”