“... stronger than that of the mid-Seventies: Benford, Gibson, Crowley, Powers, Shea, Brin, Wolfe, Morrow, Elgin, as opposed to what then seemed to be a Le Guin solo. The reason is unknown. Nevertheless, Science Fiction does seem to be back on course – exploratory, confused, scientific, even post-Gothic (so far with Aldiss), but also ...”

“... months since the late Seventies, when they killed Lord Mountbatten and 18 soldiers on one day. Tom King, the Northern Ireland Secretary, said that 500 new members of the RUC would be recruited, but he didn’t mention bringing in fresh troops. It is clear now that the SAS and possibly other undercover units were staking out police stations in anticipation ...”

“... with W.C. Fields as Micawber; one of the worst, three years later, was a plodding Tom Sawyer. Was Selznick wary of greater challenges – Bleak House or Huckleberry Finn? When he tackled Anna Karenina, also in 1935, he turned it into a glossy vehicle for Garbo; and his very last film, A Farewell to Arms, was an over-reverent flop. The best ...”

“... Canaveral to see it safely on its way aboard an American missile. This was the time described by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff, when the strip of motels and hamburger joints along Cocoa Beach became a playground for astronauts who loved ‘Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving and Driving & the rest’. ‘At night the pool areas of the motels became ...”

“... capitalist-ridden, landlord-ridden Scotland into a Scottish socialist commonwealth’. In 1968, Tom Nairn criticised the ‘common myth of Scottish left-ness’, arguing that although Scotland was ‘certainly a more egalitarian country than England’, its ‘gritty sense of equality derives from the old theocracy, not from Jacobinism or Bolshevism … the ...”

“... the manner of Julius Nyerere, or betray an agreeable weakness for the high life in the manner of Tom Mboya. He did not even show ‘nobility’ in the European tradition, which Nelson Mandela would show in 1962 when he spoke to his apartheid judges as Danton or Wolfe Tone had spoken to their accusers. Lumumba, a ...”

“... guide to Arabic. You start by learning vowel sounds via Arabic approximations of ‘Nicole’, ‘Tom’, ‘Thurman’, ‘Yoko’, which enables one to segue smoothly, surely, into a sample verb. Which in turn enables one to segue … to the variations on three-letter core meaning which are the key to the elegance of the language. KiTaaB book, JiHaaD holy ...”

“... from the violent optimism bred by entitlement.In January 1927, Sturges’s first wife, Estelle de Wolfe Mudge, an heiress, like Eleanor Hutton though on a less lavish scale, walked out on him. He fled to Chicago, and the care of his adoptive father. This seems to have been a low point. Eventually, however, violent optimism kicked in again, and over the next ...”

“... Baron’s The Lowlife (1963), set in a terrace off Amhurst Road, which was where the poet Tom Raworth (‘Raworth is the man in the Island with the word in his mouth’ – Ed Dorn) operated in his Matrix Press days. A few hundred yards to the north Jack McVitie attended his farewell party in Evering Road. By the time that Home moved in, the cells of ...”

“... an anomaly: a curious postscript to the 1790s radicalism inspired by the French revolution and Tom Paine, or an early harbinger of the next generation’s struggle for political reform. Despard’s cause was illuminated from a new direction by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of ...”

“... in the same contingent and self-legislating way that Cecil Beaton or Elsie de Wolfe was. Impeccably dressed in Poiret or Mainbocher, chummy with dukes and screen idols, little Madge from Melbourne seemed to make herself grand through an act of fiat lux. Esther Murphy on Long Island, 1923. Summing up his long and loving friendship ...”

“... is even necessary: ‘maybe one day a robot could do your job and maybe it will.’ This recalls Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book, The Right Stuff, and the insistence by the astronauts of the Mercury mission on having not only control of their craft but a window to look out of. Without this, they would be what the test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base mockingly ...”

“... country lad, a Quaker from County Durham (‘Why, aye!’). He’s Enlightenment Man in his Tom Jones aspect, a bright, good-natured extrovert who wags his tail at all that interests him, like a friendly dog. Mason, on the other hand, is Enlightenment Man in his sombre, ‘Gothickal’ aspect. He is haunted by the ghost of his dead wife, Rebekah. He ...”