“... This is a disturbing conclusion, given his tendency to make comments like this: I would give a ball to wake up tomorrow on some empty ridge with a herd of beatniks grazing in the clearing about 200 yards below the house. And then to squat with the big boomer and feel it on my shoulder with the smell of grease and powder and, later, a little blood. I have ...”

“... accounts of how Alexander Haig sought in vain to mediate between the British and the Argentinians. Douglas Kinney and David Gompert fail, however, to acknowledge that the Haig mission was doomed from the moment he assured Thatcher that the United States would line up foursquare behind Britain if the crisis reached the point of a military showdown. That ...”

“... philosopher by answering a few questions about what they had seen? Did the meteor appear as a ball or a spark of fire? i.e. was its outline distinct or was it so brilliant that outline could not be perceived. In other words I may say did it look like the moon definite in form or like a large bright fire at a distance quite indefinite except as a centre of ...”

“... industry went into a spin. Star Trek and Star Wars were wistful dreams of what might have been. Douglas Adams’s Seventies radio masterpiece, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was a nose-thumbing at the horror of it all: a whole universe, 15 billion light-years across, and hardly anybody in it at all, except on the surface of a small planet near the ...”

“... The Royal Ballet production brings out the witty nature of the piece: a man chases a tennis-ball into a garden and gets drawn into a lusty, tangled dance with two women. It was the first ballet ever danced in modern dress. The Royal Ballet’s performers play the whole thing intelligently: they follow the spirit of Nijinsky’s Modernism without turning ...”

“... 1970s, Neo-Expressionist painting looked even more absurd than it did before. As critics such as Douglas Crimp and Richard Meyer have stressed, this queering of art was also a matter of content. If the persona behind Abstract Expressionism was the ‘action painter’ in existential torment, Warhol put pretty-boy idols of mass culture up front, such as the ...”

“... aspire – got the message.’ AIPAC’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or ...”

“... was the right one, wrong blond(e)s after all having some tradition in literature: Lord Alfred Douglas, Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe, to name but three who were all wrong, all right. This account of the relationship between Auden and Kallman is written by the blond’s late-in-the-day stepmother, Dorothy J. Farnan, also blonde, who, if not wrong, is ...”

“... firing standard steel balls into London telephone directories. According to the page at which a ball had stopped they could calculate how much energy it had lost when penetrating the target. They went from telephone books to human flesh, borrowing what Zuckerman called ‘anatomical material taken from, and returned to, a hospital post-mortem room’. The ...”

“... unit equipped ‘with new Hand-bombs – glorious things, just the size and weight of a Cricket Ball!’ The previous night, he had led three men on a raid to throw them into the German trench opposite.I led off with cricket-ball No. 1 – it was just like ‘throwing in’ from ‘cover’ (a fast long hop!) – only ...”

“... eccentric. Each is a grand or smart person, of an equivocal kind. Each of these narratives has a Douglas-Home, and there are some similar fatalities. Aspinall is the son of parted parents, a ‘pseudo-orphan’ who rapidly became larger than life. He is by far the more convivial eccentric of the two. He has been surrounded by old friends to whom he professes ...”

“... hold a violin, the Chloe Kelly in that council block who will never hear the roar as she slams a ball into an open goal. For Reid, fairness would only come through social revolution. For Briggs, it was through knowledge: an eruption of public education whose lava would overflow all the conventional boundaries of elitist schooling and narrowly academic ...”

“... was a soft boy in a hard world?’ It’s a question asked by the hero’s older brother in Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, worthy winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, and it is just as much the preoccupation of his follow-up, Young Mungo, as shown by the new novel’s dedication: ‘For Alexander and all the gentle sons of Glasgow’. The worlds of the ...”

“... they despise faith, they despise family, they despise love’; and the Spectator associate editor Douglas Murray, who once called Islamophobia a ‘nonsense term’ because ‘a “phobia” is an “irrational fear”.’ One of Arc’s directors works for Legatum, a Dubai-based global investment firm ‘with an ambition to improve people’s lives by ...”

“... frontier depends on three things: cats, guns and e-mail. The sleeping beasts, curled into a fur-ball, operate as controllers, programming the writers to pitch a new kind of fiction: the familiar tricks and reflexes of genre fodder macerated in a literary sensibility. Poetry smuggled in at the back door. Sallis, an accomplished musician who has played and ...”