“... in his dead uncle’s house, thinking: ‘Tomorrow he’d lie in the earth on the top of Killeelan Hill. A man is born. He dies. Where he himself stood now on the path between these two points could not be known … He must be already well out past halfway.’The second letter in this book is from 1957, when McGahern was working as a teacher in Dublin. ‘I ...”

“... to the parklands once tended by the bucolic poet Chris Torrance), then transplanted to Notting Hill (crucible of all the counter-culture follies he was later to deride). An instinctive autodidact, Home was soon weeviling through bookstall fodder, from skins and sorts and bikers to the half-forgotten magi of the Gothic, to Black Mask, Up Against the Wall ...”

“... At the time of the Wessex computer scandal, he said, Mrs Currie’s husband Ray and his brother Brian were senior executives at Arthur Andersen. Mrs Currie was incensed by this reference, and complained of misuse of Parliamentary privilege. When I asked her whether the Secretary of State had given a misleading reply very much to the advantage of Arthur ...”

“... What​ have the Romans ever done for us?’ John Cleese asks in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His audience, not realising his question is rhetorical, replies: aqueducts, sanitation, medicine, public order, etc etc. Guy de la Bédoyère, on the other hand, doesn’t need a list: the Romans’ most important legacy, he suggests in his new book, is literacy, and specifically the habit of written memorialisation ...”

“... are its boundaries? Look up the checklist and you will find a large number of genre writers, from Brian Aldiss to P.G. Wodehouse, whose names are virtually absent from the main narrative. Bradbury’s book is based on an entirely conventional notion of the fictional mainstream. One can imagine a very different history of fiction in our century. The notion of ...”

“... died out completely. There was never much social comment in Monty Python (until they made Life of Brian), but the (Oxbridge-educated) Not the Nine O’Clock News team at the beginning of the 1980s sometimes aimed for satire, and Armando Iannucci (University College, Oxford) has blazed such a trail through broadcast comedy in recent years that no one would ...”

“... MPs, who accused the corporation of bringing comfort to the enemy. The BBC chairman, Lord Hill, responded to an early barrage of complaints in November 1971 by insisting that ‘the BBC and its staff abhor the terrorism of the IRA and report their campaign of murder with revulsion’ while at the same time reminding critics that much of the ...”

“... But the postwar rise of Labour soon saw an echo in soccer. Unionisation, spearheaded by Jimmy Hill, produced dramatic results, and by the 1970s even university graduates such as Steve Heighway could choose football as a career because it paid so well. Inevitably, one ceased to hear of the gallant amateurs of Bishop Auckland and Corinthian ...”

“... London in my hands, I spent a long time pondering the implications. For almost fifteen years Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were innocent, a ...”

“... cessation of electricity supplies, more unburied dead and untreated sewage, the prime minister, Brian Faulkner, resigned with the executive on 28 May 1974. Trimble rose in the Unionist Party, and in 1990 was elected to the House of Commons. He was pro-Europe and was less committed to capital punishment than most Unionist MPs. Though he was the party’s ...”

“... soda.’) One thinks immediately of Sylvia Plath in her small kitchen, one floor up in Primrose Hill. The last time her husband saw her there, he said, she was ‘upset and crying … tidying the place up’. By the 1980s, our house was full of stuff. Coats in the cupboards, toys in the attic, half-drunk bottles of whisky from Hogmanay. There was so much ...”

“... Tea’ and the crowd booed and threw things at her until she started screaming at us. Cypress Hill was the only act that moved a few thousand Michigan kids out of our stoned, depressed stupor to dance. What I remember about Sonic Youth was that they seemed very rigorous about what they were doing – they reminded me of the intricate, dissonant classical ...”

“... Millennium Experience, set ablaze. Flames visible across the river from Beckton Alp to Parliament Hill. ‘A man said to have a slight Irish accent said: “This is the IRA. We have planted bombs at the southern entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel. For goodness sake, do something about it. We want the area cleared.”’ So Gareth Parry reported in the Guardian ...”

“... you thought of me when I was a kid?’ ‘Nice,’ said Mr Simpson, rocking. ‘A quiet boy.’ Brian Simpson’s sister looks after him. She brought us tea and a plastic tub of biscuits. ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘I remember’ – and his hands beat a semaphore, as if guiding the words into the room – ‘that Anthony would walk up at the end of the ...”

“... elsewhere. The specialisation attendant on the need for production economies of scale, Professor Brian Ashcroft argues, means that Scotland’s economy is alarmingly dependent on four sectors – computers and office machinery; radio, TV and communications equipment; whisky; and chemicals – which together are responsible for 75 per cent of all manufactured ...”