“... normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of decades, the ...”

“... for it.’ This from the author of The Logic of Political Economy, an exposition of the ideas of David Ricardo, which John Stuart Mill, for one, thought ‘very successful’. He wouldn’t have needed to owe rent on multiple rooms and houses, had it not been that the landlords held his drafts and papers hostage as collateral for his debts. Things improved ...”

“... there when the porter came along the platform shouting the mysterious invocation ‘Lancaster Green Ayre’.11 March. R.’s Aunty Stella rings from Edinburgh. She was 90 last week and apologises that she hasn’t learned a new Shakespeare sonnet to mark her birthday. However she recites off by heart, and with no mistakes, ‘Shall I compare thee to a ...”

“... of men to work under them in the task of camouflaging tanks, first an exercise in pink and green dazzle, changing to shades of mud as reality prevailed. Wright is particularly fond of Nevinson, who, although originally a protégé of Sargent, soon developed Futurist ambitions, becoming friendly in Paris with Boccioni and Severini and subsequently ...”

“... to exploit this insight. Since childhood he’s been a fan of another chameleon and shape-shifter, David Bowie, who was raised, like the author, in Bromley. Similarly, Kureishi’s next novel The Black Album was named after a bootleg LP by Prince to whom the main character, Shahid, is devoted. Prince plunders freely from various musical genres, from rock or ...”

“... writer looks back to Donne and forward to Defoe. There is a gulf between, say, Marvell’s ‘green’ poems and his political verses, and some of the first may be contemporary with the second. An artist may or must (like Hamlet) look back and forward, ‘before and after’, as Dryden himself does in ‘Mr Congreve’: ‘Well now, the promis’d hour is ...”

“... Ghanaians, Communist Party etc.’ There wasn’t much truth in these claims. ‘At its height,’ David Gibbs writes in The Political Economy of Third World Intervention (1991), ‘the communist intervention in the Congo comprised no more than 380 Soviets and Czechoslovaks – against 14,000 UN troops and many thousands of Belgian military ...”

“... Or: ‘The floor of the chancel is set with encaustic tiles with designs in red, brown, pale green, white and rich Wedgwood blue.’ Mass was said in this sumptuous building in 1846 and work continued on the cathedral for the next few years.It seems incongruous now, barely possible that this wealth of detail was being incorporated into an Irish Catholic ...”

“... Swing Tenor – after his disastrous nervous breakdown in the US Army in the 1940s. According to David Perry in Jazz Greats (1996),Many claims, some of them vague and inflated, have been made about the linguistic originality of black American English, but in the case of Lester Young’s language, such claims seem to have some substance. Buck Clayton believed ...”

“... was to remain unchanged in the future. The falklands war concentrated British minds. As Goose Green had shown, defence is an inescapable duty of sovereignty. Where the mighty United States could not defend South Vietnam, Britain had neither the hope nor the heart for tiny Hong Kong. No British governmenthas ever intended to offer refuge to more than a few ...”

“... tourists love, just as there’s a head of Joyce, which no one much looks at, in St Stephen’s Green. When Nora stood Joyce up on 14 June, he wrote to her ardently, demanding another date. They met on 16 June, which is when their story began, and when Ulysses both began and ended. Lucky it wasn’t on Good Friday, when the pubs are closed. I wonder if the ...”

“... Yet if, like Melanie Phillips, you believe Islamic banking in the UK merely hastens the day when a green flag is raised over Westminster, it’s important to think of ‘usury’ in the later sense, in order to insist that Muslim law is either deluded or deceitful: ‘The whole issue of sharia finance,’ Phillips wrote last year, ‘is based on a fabrication ...”

“... is about 8500 square miles. About a third of the corn is supposed to be for ethanol, the not very green alternative to petroleum, so you can see the Gulf being throttled by a pair of energy-economy hands. Inland are the refineries and chemical plants that have given a swathe of the region the nickname Cancer Alley.Louisiana is in many ways a semi-tropical ...”

“... iced water, was a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you ...”

“... writhing in the throes of a midlife crisis and sexual combat (‘What do [women] want? They eat green salad and drink human blood’), composes feverish letters to current lovers and dead philosophers – was a landmark moment in the power-lifting of Jewish-American fiction. ‘Over the past ten or 15 years,’ Julian Moynihan announced in the New York ...”