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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Schwarz (Fricka) and Heinz Zednik (Loge). Here, and throughout the cycle, the lighting was superb. Brian Large’s direction of the filming was sensitive, and provided a salutary contrast with the horrors of BBC Television’s Kata Kabanova. But although Wagner’s exploration of the corrupting, dehumanising effects of power naturally includes an indictment of ...”

“... before one day Bardens looked out of his fifth-floor office window in Alexandra Palace, on its hill above the North London suburbs, and saw the capital winking and humming to the south. ‘I suddenly thought, “Bugger it,”’ he remembers here, ‘“Panorama, that’s the title.”’ The first edition was a disaster. To make the programme as ...”

“... minute knowledge of East Coast hip hop. We said ‘wack’ and ‘dope’ while quoting Life of Brian, bought baggy trousers so wiggerish and wide that when the wind blew down from the Alps and into Luisenstraße it would catch them like sails, propelling us forwards or dragging us backwards to Irish bars with Republican posters where Liam would get free ...”