“... book, but for some years I had been impressed with the fact that many people I admired then – Martin Luther King, Reinhold Neibuhr, the Kennedys, Isaiah Berlin and Wilson himself – were also dedicated Zionists, totally opposed to anything like a Palestinian side. Wilson himself was a philo-semite, and particularly enthusiastic about scholar-warriors ...”

“... he was already editing the magazine under his own name, reviewing for it as ‘Martin Gillespie’, and employing himself as its Advertising Manager (and occasional contributor), ‘A.K. Laidlaw’. We tend to think of the subject of this biography as the greatest voice of modern Scottish literature; more accurately, he is the greatest ...”

“... her battle cry and rushed biting and clawing into the midst of a mass of opposing gangsters’. Martin Scorsese’s Little Italy childhood was spent a short distance from the no-longer Points, and though the stories in Asbury’s book started a thirty-year obsession to transform The Gangs of New York into Gangs of New York, what made it to the screen ...”

“... climbs a tree to protect it from chainsaws. Theo at Fairmile a few months ago wore a composite Lewis Carroll creation, a mushroom with a Mad Hatter’s hat, and a caterpillar snaking round his body. Ex-circus performers Rosie and Emma perform their tricky arts on the walkways. ‘Protesters are artists,’ says Ratty, a tunneller, ‘trying to make this ...”

“... after the Cold War’. In addition to Bradbury’s invented personages the conferees include Martin Amis, Günter Grass and Susan Sontag (she skips one of the later conferences in the narrative, on the grounds that there is something more interesting going on in Northern Italy). Bradbury’s Villa Barolo is funded by the American Magno Foundation ...”

“... above the viscosity of ordinary life. These motifs are often associated with the male: as Wyndham Lewis put it in Tarr, ‘God was man: the woman was a lower form of life. Everything started female and so continued: a jellyfish diffuseness spread itself and gaped upon all the beds and bas-fonds of everything.’ Even if we agree with Pinkney that ‘female ...”

“... says: ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard.’ If I understand the textual note in Martin Stannard’s authoritative edition of the novel (Norton, 1995), this sentence wasn’t in the typescript of the first three and a half chapters sent to Wyndham Lewis for inclusion in the first issue of BLAST (June ...”

“... free speech he explored in the work of Louis Brandeis and Roscoe Pound. As his biographer Justin Martin discovered, Nader became obsessed with his own version of civil rights: ‘body rights’ – the right not to be killed or maimed. And the chief violator of these rights, in his view, was the automobile industry. During his long absences from law ...”

“... had no chair of governors, despite legal stipulations. But the school prospectus listed Alan Lewis, a former deputy chair of the Conservative Party, as its ‘executive patron’, and the leaked EFA report concludes that he had been the ‘chair of governors between September 2011 and October 2012’. Lewis also rented ...”

“... haven of pastoralism is appealed to as the escape from corruption. In The Child in Time, Stephen Lewis is a children’s writer, but by accident. He wrote his first novel – about a summer holiday he spent when he was 11 – as an adult book. But his publisher, Charles Darke, insists that it is a children’s book, that children will read it and understand ...”

“... Ramsey’s, one shared with Keynes. In philosophy: Ramsey sentences, the Ramsey test, the Ramsey-Lewis theory of reference, and the Mill-Ramsey-Lewis account of natural laws. Many of his ideas were so groundbreaking that they were taken up in earnest only decades later. This phenomenon has also been named after him: the ...”

“... of a café where the waiters impersonate Buddy Holly, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Donna Reed, Martin and Lewis and so on, is funnier than the filming of a set where people do this. When Travolta, eating here with Uma Thurman, orders the Douglas Sirk steak, the joke is all the better for being so pointless and ...”

“... about the Slump and how to cure it, and, by extension, right about the Old Gang blocking his path? Martin Pugh’s publishers tell us breathlessly that ‘this book demonstrates for the first time how close Britain came to being a Fascist state in the interwar years.’ Is that a fact or just a pretty piece of hype? Does the limelight that Mosley continued to ...”

“... to establish left the Hogarth Press to seek larger advances from bigger houses. He tells Cecil Day-Lewis he doesn’t mind him taking his detective stories to Collins, but adds that he won’t accept an arrangement whereby he gets sent the books that probably won’t sell while the others are reserved for somebody else. On such topics he meditates with a ...”