“... House of Adams’ is ‘buried’ and ‘beyond recovery’. History in the guise of Andrew Jackson and U.S. Grant had seen to that. Ancestral traits presaged the family’s decline. The Adamses had good reason to think well of themselves (they had ‘held in succession every position of dignity and power their nation could give’), but they ...”

“... other Sixties figure, had been hired to tame it – was the final meeting between McCullin and Andrew Neil, Murdoch’s Editor on the Sunday Times, when McCullin was sacked. His images were no longer needed at the beginning of the That-cherite Eighties: they were an embarrassment in the age of greed and getting, and he was hanging around, unused, in ...”

“... the first time they troubled Southern historians. Gladys’s family hark back to Cherokee Indians. Andrew Presley, a Scottish blacksmith, emigrated to North Carolina in the middle of the 18th century. His son fought in the Wars of Independence and finally settled in the district of Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis Aaron was born 150 years later. Elvis and ...”

“... and of passion that fiction ordinarily privileges. ‘London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith,’ we are told in Mrs Dalloway. Woolf records and reclaims Smith from anonymity, just as she does the domestic life of Mrs Ramsay, whose energies are not expressed in writing. This desire to give space and meaning to unregarded lives is a ...”

“... at Owen’s College in Manchester, ‘what kinds of habits &c I had to overcome when I was young & thinking of speaking to others.’ But he took pains to learn, and to fashion a suitable character for his performances. Dignified, unostentatious, unforced, he became the handsome, masculine face of Victorian public science, a gentleman who could command ...”

“... than 90 per cent of all the deaths in drone strikes (the ex-military officers David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum). In March 2012, the New York Times reported that all military-age males, armed or unarmed, are considered to be combatants unless there is posthumous evidence proving otherwise; the Obama administration recently disputed this. Most of the ...”

“... in his account of Arthur’s teenage years. Over the space of a few pages, we learn that young Arthur chose to follow his father to Harvard, where he lived in the dormitory where Senior was a fellow, enrolled in Senior’s classes and legally changed his middle name from Bancroft to Meier so that he could officially be ‘Junior’. Aldous suggests ...”

“... Literary Brat Pack, Manhattan’s bohemian answer to Hollywood’s Brat Pack (Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald – almost any actor who appeared in a John Hughes teen film qualified). The Literary Brat Pack was a journalistic readymade, roping together a number of writers who may have scarcely known each other and ...”

“... grace is a self-hating representation of the satirist’s art: ‘all the Yahoos in that district, young and old, male and female, come in a body, and discharge their excrements upon him from head to foot.’ More decorous and less self-loathing satirists than Swift are, of course, available. There is Horace, whose dialogues with baffled interlocutors invite ...”

“... most basic. At Tamai in March 1884, when Graham ordered the Black Watch to move forward, Captain Andrew Scott-Stevenson found himself in danger of being overcome by a throng of Dervishes until ‘my trusty claymore found its way to the hilt into several black devils. I clove a piece out of one of their heads just as one does an egg for breakfast and saw his ...”

“... Northern Irish poetry during the last twenty-five or thirty years. Ever since Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion gave the primacy of this work semi-official status in The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary British Poetry, the question has been what gives Northern Irish poets their edge. Many reasons have been advanced for the phenomenon: Ireland’s verbal ...”

“... is very different. In this ode the poet imagines his lady, Pyrrha, in the arms of some smooth young man and, instead of raging jealously, pities his rival – the lady will be false to him as she has been to the poet:              O how oft shall he On Faith and changed Gods complain: and Seas   Rough with black winds and storms ...”

“... style to the new medium. In 1952 he made contact with another producer looking for a TV project, Andrew Miller Jones. Miller Jones was an ex-Army officer with a yellow Rolls-Royce, the first of a large number of Panorama staff over the next fifty years with either a military background or an ostentatious personal style, or both. Together, Miller Jones and ...”

“... out’ from his fan base to achieve genuine bestsellerdom. The book owes a great deal to Andrew O’Hagan’s The Missing, a debt acknowledged by the dedication of Rankin’s next novella, Death Is Not the End, the following year. O’Hagan’s book told the story of a murderer known as Bible John whose deeds and, just as important, whose legend ...”

“... He also gives an early, sceptical perspective on the Mahler legend as it was gestating among the young people of Vienna. After a predictable assault on the material of the Sixth, he meditates interestingly on the spirit behind the music: The right mood isn’t there, nor the tenderness, the happy introspection, the calm inherent in creation. All these ...”