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“... North Americans they’d have a good fifteen minutes of warning before any nuclear attack. He took sick leave for depression and had panic attacks; he had been hospitalised, and reported regularly for electroshock therapy years after his release. His mother also had depression, and one of his nephews had schizophrenia. But for mid-century American ...”

“... The first volume of John Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1955, starts: When I try to remember where my education in poetry began, the first image that comes to mind is that of my father’s library at the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp ...”

“... the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified ...”

“... out on Jason’s boat with our wives, On our way to Block Island, With our friend the novelist John Marquand Who wrote under the name John Phillips Because he was the son of the novelist John Marquand, All of us hungover from the night before at George’s, And under the heatstroke ...”

“... he’s gone and joined this weird sect. He sits in a cave with his guru, a batty old bugger called John and scribbles on scrolls stuff to scare you while the rabbi goes rabbiting on. He seems dead to us does my brother. He’s been so thoroughly brainwashed by John ‘I look in your eyes,’ said our mother ‘But the bright ...”

“... in Rome in the early 1400s to explore and measure the ruins of antiquity. This pleasurable task took him some years before he returned home to put the lessons he had learned to remarkable use. Florence had proved wanting in classical history but it provided a fertile ground for the exploration of the new. The Renaissance was a rebirth which ...”

“... Octagon Theatre. One chain of events focuses on the Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester, Mr John Stalker, who was recently suspended for three months during an internal disciplinary investigation and subsequently reinstated by the lay Police Authority, despite the evident willingness of his senior colleagues to have him face a tribunal. The other ...”

“... that British new music – equally suspicious of European modernism and anything American, whether John Cage or Janis Joplin – wasn’t a club worth joining. Although he had no desire to take up 12-tone composition techniques, Arnold Schoenberg’s music appealed to him intellectually and he engaged with it seriously – in noticeable contrast to Vaughan ...”

“... The state allocated these in too small quantities or not at all. There were bound to be those who took the (diminishing) risk of supplying them for a premium. In other countries, there are merchants: in the Soviet Union, there were only criminals; and since they needed protection, the criminals criminalised large sections of the Party and the state, creating ...”

“... it handed the control of inflation over to the bank in 1997: the single most important decision it took about the economy, and one not mentioned or hinted at in either its manifesto or the general election campaign. At the same time, Labour took away the regulatory role of the bank and gave it to a new agency, the Financial ...”

“... Pilkington had been a pet of Swift’s and had received from him harsh treatment that she took for affection: sardonic put-downs, peremptory instructions and plenty of pinching. ‘The Dean’, as she always calls him, showed her his poems and letters and instructed her in literature, though he was ‘a very rough sort of a Tutor’. In the early ...”

“... except how to please him ... I always loved the sort of people who were cool towards me, and only took me for what I was worth ... There is the case of Dyakov ... I shall never forget the night when we were travelling from Pirogovo, and, wrapped up under a travelling rug, I wanted to kiss him and cry. There was sensuality in that feeling, but why it ...”

“... perhaps better known, thanks to the immense success of the HBO series, as Game of Thrones, which took its title from the first novel in the series.† Game of Thrones was first described to me, by someone familiar with the project from before its initial broadcast, as ‘The Sopranos meets Lord of the Rings.’ At that point, I knew I was going to like ...”

“... stage, he said, ‘was where I master time’. Springsteen bet his life on music. ‘Whatever it took, I was in,’ he said. He and his various early bands sucked up the rejection of audiences, record producers, promoters. His credo, as one of his songs puts it, was ‘no retreat, no surrender’. ‘They didn’t understand they were dealing with men ...”

“... plenty of damage. (In the case of H. floresiensis, Indonesia’s leading palaeoanthropologist took the first skeleton away for himself, kept it for a period of months, and returned it severely damaged.) I especially like Neolithic sites, in which Britain and Ireland are very rich: I love the sense that by stretching out our imagination and empathy in ...”