“... been positively avoided, not just disregarded. When the war came, Whistler, like Charles Ryder and Guy Crouchback, found himself a rather old soldier. But he wanted an honourable war, and even if the War Artists’ Committee had called on him, he might well have chosen regimental service. He died in France in 1944, in his first tank battle. He is not a painter ...”

“... Johnston’s best things. It loses nothing by its air of doomed gentility. The narrator could be Guy Crouchback talking: there was a seductive glamour about the squires going off to war, and a potent sorrow when they did not come home. But though Johnston can be impersonal about himself, he cannot be that way about his brother. The poem tries to find outlets ...”

“... Alaric to burn a professional lifetime’s notes on the bonfire in his back garden one Guy Fawkes night. Later, watching them from an upstairs window next-door, two kindly middle-aged female neighbours reflect: ‘But oh dear ... if ever Catherine and Alaric should marry, what a difficult and peculiar couple they would make!’ The romanticism of ...”

“... a collectivist matriarchy in Africa set up (and worked out on the page) by a charismatic white guy from the United States. Yet for the narrator, if not for all readers, the irony qualifies the utopia without disqualifying it. In the end, Tsau comes under threat from religious disputes, the reassertion of masculine prerogative, and the sudden mental frailty ...”

“... Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen ...”

“... at his fanciful plots. Standardised in the mid-century US, in Astounding magazine, edited by John W. Campbell, Hard SF advertises consumer goods like personal robots and flying cars. It valorises space travel that culminates in successful (if difficult) contact with the alien life assumed to be strewn throughout the galaxies, and glows with a ...”

“... of this is hinted at in his diaries. When, for example, Nicolson writes in 1945, ‘I dined with Guy Burgess who shows me the telegrams exchanged with Moscow,’ there is no suggestion either that he knows anything of Burgess’s work as Soviet agent, or that they were bedmates.By contrast, Channon’s account of his and others’ sex lives is ...”

“... teach us to do dead-checking when we’re clearing rooms. You put two bullets into the guy’s chest and one in the brain. But when you enter a room where guys are wounded, you might not know if they’re alive or dead. So they teach us to dead-check them by pressing them in the eye with your boot, because generally a person, even if he’s faking ...”

“... made legs seem stumbling and stumpy, shortness there’. The madness, too, of her father, John Guthrie, whose eyes slip ‘up and down her dress’ when Chris is harassed by a local ‘daftie’ and ‘peep out’, like those of ‘a caged beast’, when he sees her in her knickers; who sneaks round the door of her room at night, ‘a great cat ...”

“... an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ‘using a hatchet when you need a scalpel’ when John McCain proposed it during the campaign of 2008. In the same speech, Obama embraced the false analogy between federal budgets and household budgets, overlooking (for starters) the government’s control of taxation and the money supply. ‘Families across the ...”

“... would be seen through its ogival windows. What bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal ...”

“... for the next attempt to regenerate national pride. The early omens weren’t good. Weight picks up John O’Farrell’s story about her election as Conservative Party leader in 1976, when she appeared in front of the cameras and gave a ‘V’ for victory sign the wrong way round. ‘She was smiling and telling the British people to fuck off at the same ...”

“... going on behind the scenes. ‘Despite the controversial nature of this concept,’ the analyst Guy Thompson writes, ‘there is a pervasive agreement among analysts that whatever the unconscious is it is certainly not a form of consciousness.’ And that means that the Freudian unconscious should not be imagined as similar to, or comparable to, or even ...”

“... round number pulled out of a hat. In the New York Times the PR spokesman identified himself as ‘John Barron’. In the Associated Press story the same publicity man called himself ‘Donald Baron’ and was quoted as saying that ‘the merit of these stones was not great enough to save them.’ Both ‘John’ and ...”

“... sampler of the high life. In both roles he fitted right in: he was, in his own words, John Bunyan’s ‘Mr Facing-both-ways’. He is intensely, almost insanely sociable. He discovered at an early age that being able to perform as a public speaker meant that ‘you need never dine or sleep alone.’ Early on, he mainly chose to sleep with boys ...”