“... equal to the human population at the time. His great enemy was Rattus norvegicus, the Norwegian or brown rat, which was believed to have arrived in Britain on Scandinavian trading ships in the 18th century. In fact, Rattus norvegicus probably came to Europe from northern China. Its ferocity and adaptability meant that it soon displaced its smaller and more ...”

“... and dust in Sacramento would be like a plague or a curse – so that Joan’s new husband, John Gregory Dunne, when he came to visit, would use a mischievous finger to write ‘DUST’ here and there. Dunne, who died at the end of last year, was tall, handsome, articulate, funny – the man of the world behind whose attractive show Joan hid and ...”

“... I was hired​ as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print ...”

“... the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ of the ...”

“... smiled sweetly and said, ‘Oh, you’ve scooted across the park from the West Side in your little brown suit and your big brown shoes.’ To which the Brooklyn boy still alive in me replied: ‘Fuck you, Jackie’ ... And so we became even faster friends than we already were. Who would expect anything different? There is ...”

“... has estimated), promised bottomless state contracts for the likes of Bechtel, and Kellogg, Brown and Root. The US Overseas Private Investment Corporation delicately called it the ‘next Klondike’; in 2003, Halliburton’s Iraq contracts represented 22 per cent of its total revenues. Providing, of course, that a pliant and stable Iraq could be ...”

“... as a poet. ‘It is all a battle,’ he announced to his friend and partner in art, the painter John Minton. He and Dunsmuir lived in conditions of spectacular inconvenience: a poky caravan for some years and later a cottage to which the word ‘spartan’ doesn’t really do justice – ‘a leaking roof, no cooking stove, no electricity, an outside toilet ...”

“... to the ‘kitchen sink’ allegedly installed somewhere in the house. Novels by Stan Barstow, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey and others framed stories told from the point of view of an aspiring and/or truculent working-class protagonist, often Northern, usually but not always male, as a Bildungsroman or novel of moral and sentimental ...”

“... In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted Leonard Woolf’s characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes ...”

“... socks, windows, the car, the looall downstream from each other. Whenthat final basinful of brown scumwas scattered over the garden plants,you could see water in his own eyesaching to join it ...The only problem with this engaging portrait is why it needed to be a poem at all. It’s the beginning of an okay prose short story whose lines stop short of ...”

“... terrible reeking smell’ and ‘there, near the toilet we see the words Blak Power written in brown faeces on the large bathroom mirror.’ In Glory, the ‘wretched Comrades on the Seat of Power’ are described as ‘fathers [of the nation], as much as heaps of dried turds could ever be fathers of anything’, and members of a ‘savage callous regime ...”

“... of the first half of this decade, writers as diverse in talent and sensibility as Rebecca Brown, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Gary Indiana and Sarah Schulman, writers whose main similarity seemed to be that they all started out at small presses before being ‘discovered’ by big houses.By now – by which I mean, in the most Nixonian sense of the ...”

“... diaries, which Tynan bequeathed on his deathbed to his daughter Tracy. They have been edited by John Lahr, the perfect choice for the task – indeed, an inescapable one. Lahr is Tynan’s true successor at the New Yorker, reviewing theatre for the magazine, as did Tynan, and, more important, filling his loafers as its premier celebrity profile writer, its ...”

“... men – ‘the very intelligent and … those who serve our cause as soldiers’. When the actor John Wilkes Booth heard that remark he warned: ‘That means nigger citizenship! Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.’ Three days later, on Good Friday, Booth made good on his threat, shooting Lincoln at Ford’s ...”

“... aerial bombing left dents in the terraces, social housing went up post-WW2. Chachki’s brown-brick, low-rise estate, L-shaped at the corner with Arlington being one example, typical with its external walkways along the façade connecting the blue or black front doors of the flats on the first and second floors. Small windows are designed to reduce ...”