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“... he would suddenly look at his watch, remember that he had something more important to do and rush off. His lectures were spontaneous, fluent, wide-ranging, inspiring for the cognoscenti but difficult for undergraduates. When one of them left his notebook behind, we found it empty, with the single heading: ‘Bernal’s Bloody Business’. Now, 28 years ...”

“... the free-market excesses that were to follow. Punk auditioned the dark night of Keith Joseph and Norman Tebbit. It turns out that none of the punk parasites much liked the sounds or the bands who produced them. They were career anarchists, varnishing their leather armour while they waited for an offer from the Daily Mail. Essentially, NME ‘new ...”

“... of adult life that remain to be learned; the photo and the friendship are shuffled into the past. Norman Mailer reported on the Liston-Patterson fight for Esquire in dispatches that were uncharacteristically equivocal. In his account, victory is Liston’s because Patterson fought like a man down with jaundice, but that does not prevent Liston from being ...”

“... innocuous but mentions something ‘Soviet’ or ‘Russian’ in passing, as in the case of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, these passages are assiduously excised). It must be highly critical of life in ‘capitalist’ society (or must at least leave some slight revulsion about Western ways in the souls of the Russian readers). And it must ...”

“... of their transplanting. The common view of Bret Harte – the chronicler of the California Gold Rush who cut himself off from the primacy of his Western experience when he turned English gentleman – is convincingly undermined by this book. He kept writing stories set in the Wild West, but they were far from the hack work so derided by contemporary ...”

“... a thought!’, ‘Hush!’, ‘Hark!’), a desire to register the vertiginous rush of the present moment – for which driving with no hands is a vivid hyperbolic analogy, and which entails the use of a head-over-heels free verse – and a tendency to sound blasé or deadpan when the imagery becomes surreal. They also share a slightly camp ...”

“... is that his 1970s-vintage literary models – among them Robert Stone, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer in Vietnam-era reportage mode – turned out to be pretty useful for a writer hitting his stride at the start of the 21st century. His main adjustments concern mood. For the pill-popping nerviness of Didion and Stone’s Americans abroad, he ...”

“... a domestic style that was more subtly responsive to local weather than any before or since. Norman Shaw, Baillie Scott and Philip Webb designed houses with central ‘living halls’, sociable spaces from which rooms led off, opening out in bay windows to take the inhabitants into the garden on the most inclement of days. Yet, Harris insists, ‘ivy ...”

“... became operational in 1963 and remained in service until the end of 1970. Another reason not to rush into H-bomb production was that after the amendment to the McMahon Act the US was willing to supply complete thermonuclear weapons to Britain (and other countries) provided they were kept under US control. W-49 warheads with a yield of 1.4 megatons were ...”

“... freeform headaches. They didn’t palm their complimentary tickets for this filth. The cold sober rush of Home’s amphetamine prose is delivered, with no prompts, straight into their faces, in a word-perfect articulation of the printed page. No fumbling with sheets of paper, no mumbled apologies – the business. There’s been nothing in the annals of ...”

“... of MacGregor was a public act and he was to do rather maladroitly what his predecessor, Sir Norman Siddall, was doing by stealth – and he was to do it very publicly, as he was expected to. The hand of the Government was brutally clear, for example, in the DHSS’s decision to ‘deem’ that the miners were receiving £15-a-week strike pay – they ...”

“... the leading light of this and several other protests during the occupation, said she saw Gullace rush towards her husband, who was standing on the other side of the railings. ‘She was only five metres away from me,’ Radice said. ‘I cannot swear whether the man who killed her was an SS motorcyclist or one of those imbecile, arrogant fascist militiamen ...”

“... if salaries were restored to their relative position of 1980, I doubt whether there would be a rush back into British academia without other fundamental changes. And this is where we are back to money as a symbol. Few people become dons in order to become rich, though one or two in each generation succeed in doing so. What attracts is job ...”

“... milk-stained by the sun. From the window of the hotel I could see a distant church tower in Norman style, so I walked toward it. Built in 1957, it was not as old as it looked. Above the door was an unusually small black-and-white photograph of our host, Saddam Hussein, the President or Rais of Iraq, indicating (I hope) that the churches as well as the ...”

“... who is often shy and unsure of himself, short of money, screwed by publishers, and in a desperate rush. Only Yeats could make a dense stack of business letters read with all the blossomy excitement of a bildungsroman. This is typical of his epistolary style: 58 Eardley Crescent South Kensington 22 March Dear Miss Tynan I send you the only forms I can ...”