“... quite at the front, he passed the time in training, in hospital with bronchitis, or hanging around London using his lieutenant’s uniform to pick up women. Others might write of the horrors of trench warfare but Wheatley was inspired to write a romantic novel, Julie’s Lovers, which was rejected by Cassell. More important so far as his literary development ...”

“... and a belief, along with Williams, that American modernism should be relocated from Paris and London to the US. Asked to edit an issue of Poetry in 1931, Zukofsky put them together, along with Williams, Carl Rakosi, Basil Bunting, Kenneth Rexroth and a stylistically random collection of others (including the young Whittaker Chambers), under the rubric of ...”

“... work by John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked subscribers, of which there were more than a million by the end of the ...”

“... His first major narrative work, Sweet Violets (2012), was a Grand Guignol ballet about Jack the Ripper and his victims. There were too many ill-defined characters and the plot was chaotic. Hansel and Gretel (2013) and The Age of Anxiety (2014) had similar problems. Meanwhile, the pure dance pieces he created for other companies, such as Viscera ...”

“... the last rag and bone cart – it’s a sight that disappeared without fanfare. Growing up in West London close to the M4 I would see hitchhikers all the time, and by my late teens I was one of them. The first ride out of town usually dropped me at a motorway service station in the West Country, or on the outskirts of Bristol. At popular spots – the Gordano ...”

“... yobbos beating up the Bogside Papists. The Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the Republic of Ireland, Jack Lynch, appealed to the UN and said, evidently referring to the Irish Army: ‘We will not stand by.’ The wise knew what Lynch meant: we will huff and puff and do nothing. Fools thought he meant – and Unionists in the North pretended to think he meant ...”

“... 1651, in the last battle before Charles II fled abroad. Urquhart, with many others, was taken to London as a prisoner, where, apparently, he determined to recover his freedom and his estates by using his pen. His first effort was a genealogy in which he names and describes his ancestors, going back to Adam. They were a notable line, and distinguished in ...”

“... have been,’ Wharton loyally assures us. But the war came to an end and Wharton had to return to London, where Thomson found him a job writing scripts about the Luddites for the BBC Schools Programme: ‘Our children are starvin’! Smash the frames! Aye, smash the devil’s frames!’ The trouble with his BBC associates was that they were stubbornly soft on ...”

“... ran: We are practically wiped out but we charged and took the Hun trenches yesterday. I stopped a Jack Johnson with my head, and my skull is slightly cracked. But I’m getting on splendidly. I did awfully well. Grenfell died slowly enough from the shell-splinter for his family to rush over and attend. His mother read him poems and Euripides’s ...”

“... Toots Shor’s in the West Fifties, when the shades were drawn and the jock talk was of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and Damon Runyon (never of broads, Kahn tells us). Heroes of the book are the Life team who adopted the ‘rougher’ style of journalism in the Fifties and helped to drive the Jostler into retirement, or the reporters who tracked down Joe and ...”

“... for piano keys, and elephants themselves were exported – among them Jumbo, who was sent to London Zoo and then sold to Barnum and Bailey’s circus in America. Khartoum’s traders and freebooters raided for slaves, or played divide-and-rule among the people of the southern forests and marshes, buying captives for their own plantations along the river ...”

“... appeared to be enjoying a similar impunity. Then, suddenly, in October 1998 he was arrested in London for human rights abuses and detained in Britain until March 2000. The book retells this familiar saga, aiming to add new elements and interpretations. Again, Sands reveals a personal stake. The DINA’s murder of his relation Carmelo Soria was one of the ...”

“... book, nothing Veorah says could surprise the reader, short of verbatim quotations from Hansard or Jack the Ripper’s diaries. It will scarcely come as a shock to reveal that realism is not Fullalove’s mode, but the book still hankers after some of realism’s effects. The author wants his expressionism, and the obsessions he explores through his ...”

“... going to have a stroke – they were laughing so much.’ These incongruously merry souls were Jack Fingleton and Bill O’ Reilly, both of whom had played in Test Matches under Bradman in the Thirties and had had their run-ins with him. They were both fine players, O’ Reilly especially, as a bowler of unpleasantly quick leg-breaks, and they had come ...”

“... didn’t take, choosing Dean Rusk instead. At Graham’s suggestion, Bruce became Ambassador in London, and before very long Graham was badgering Kennedy to sack Rusk and give the job to Bruce. Philip Graham was hyperactive. Kennedy made him chairman of the ground-breaking satellite company, Comsat. He wrote speeches for both the Kennedy brothers and for ...”