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“... I’m not the brains behind this,’ she said. ‘But I tell you one thing. They got rid of Billy Wright. That was a big mistake.’Wright was a terrifying figure, a prolific sectarian killer who rejected the loyalist ceasefires and set up his own paramilitary group which played a prominent role at Drumcree and continued to kill Catholics. In December ...”

“... wants to retrieve Marx the man and exonerate him from responsibility for what has been done in his name. Marxism is not Karl Marx, it is true, any more than Darwinism is Charles Darwin. You may not be astonished by this thought. ‘What neither his enemies nor his disciples are willing to acknowledge is the most obvious yet startling of all his qualities: that ...”

“... the editors of Medium Aevum, the Journal of Pomology and The New Phytologist, the creator of Billy Bunter, the murdered Beatle. There are names which have not been on anyone’s lips for a long time, like that of Sir Valentin Chirol, a crusty eminence of the Times. The first woman doctor is kept company by the first woman barrister, Ivy Williams. The ...”

“... the wife of the President of Nigeria. The royal family get to be themselves, though, and so does Billy Connolly, alone among broadcasting talent (unless you count Alistair Cooke and Clive James, who provide epigraphs). This may be because Lawson overlooked Connolly when it came to changing the names, or it may be because he forgot Connolly isn’t a member ...”

“... It was over. Act V, scene vi of the Scottish play. Epping Forest on the move. The power of the name would never again be enough. (Kray being the Anglicised form of Krähe, the German for ‘crow’. Tell that to Ted Hughes.) The Bethnal Green labyrinth was still guarded at each of its four corners by pub signs bearing the portraits of birds, but the ...”

“... mistake, Boston had already blown their lead (on a wild pitch, though almost no one remembers the name of the pitcher who threw it, Bob Stanley, or the catcher who missed it, Rich Geldman) and the game was tied. If Buckner had picked up the ball, the game would have gone to extra innings, giving someone else the chance to screw up. This was quickly forgotten ...”

“... improbably recalled Greyfriars School during autumn term. The dead giveaway that this was not Billy Bunter’s alma mater but a church in Northern Ireland was the RUC land-rover drawn up in the drive like an armoured hearse. We wanted the pictures to introduce a story about a priest who had agreed to talk to us about his flock’s fears of Loyalist ...”

“... centre of London’s homosexual subculture. When, in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, the bisexual Billy Prior is introduced to Ross, the first thing he registers is ‘the connection with Wilde’. Wilde’s influence was felt, too, in the continuing notoriety of Salome, given a new lease of life by the success of The Vision of Salome, a titillating dance ...”

“... ring a colourful bell for many people who until now did not realise that their experience had a name, and who will now be able to identify themselves with like-minded others. Dr Baron-Cohen is a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, the University Lecturer in Psychopathology, the recipient of both the British Psychological Society’s Spearman Medal and ...”

“... life that emerges as the medium takes hold.’ Copland had already written two ballet scores: Billy the Kid for Ballet Caravan in 1938 and Rodeo for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1942. But this new score, commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation in July 1942, was not for a ballet company but for Graham, America’s high priestess of ...”

“... us from the fact that local libraries are being closed down all over the place. The Minister’s name is Alan Howarth. He has the manner of an experienced schoolmaster who likes to think of himself as gentle but firm. The lower register of his voice purrs with sincerity. Could this be the same Alan Howarth, I wonder, who gave me and my sisters two pet ...”

“... it is so obvious what the characters are thinking that they might as well be shouting. As in the Billy Joel song they are sharing a drink they call loneliness but it’s better than drinking alone. The first person we see in the film talks a bit but we learn far more from what we see of him and around him. He’s a drug dealer checking in with one of his ...”

“... She knows about Jurgen, the hippy German handyman, who is in love with her and whose ‘special name’ for her is Kitty Ket, and Madeleine, the bitter English doctor who watches and judges and ekes out her miserable retirement from the Villa Rose next door, and is, in Kitty’s words, an ‘evil old witch’. And yet the hint of magic turns out to be quite ...”

“... slicer with the Swiss roll hairdo could well be Burra himself, or his best friend ‘Dearie’ Billy Chappell. The hands incidentally look prosthetic while Burra’s own hands were grievously swollen and clawed. He had suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and pernicious anaemia since childhood; for him every floppy pink slice of life was something to be eyed ...”

“... uncle ‘who much prefers/to ring a little bell than to speak’; the pathologically disengaged ‘Billy’, whose companion observes that everything she says bores him; and ‘The Man in the Quilted Dressing-gown’, whose ageing body, ‘as warm and apathetic as a pie’, is tended to by young female carers, while all he wants is ‘to be alone with his ...”