“... its own network of clever, ambitious men. Peter Jay, Peter Mandelson, Christopher Hitchens, Brian Walden and their slightly geeky colleagues turned out to be a more influential and politically adept group than Panorama’s fist-fighting war reporters. And none was more geeky and influential than Weekend World’s creator and guiding spirit: Panorama’s ...”

“... minute knowledge of East Coast hip hop. We said ‘wack’ and ‘dope’ while quoting Life of Brian, bought baggy trousers so wiggerish and wide that when the wind blew down from the Alps and into Luisenstraße it would catch them like sails, propelling us forwards or dragging us backwards to Irish bars with Republican posters where Liam would get free ...”

“... Hofmann reprints a version of the short story of 1936 that provided the germ of the book (as Brian O’Kill demonstrated in the Times Literary Supplement in 1974, this is in fact not the original short story text, as is commonly thought, but Chapter 8 of Lowry’s 1941 draft of Under the Volcano), and he also gives us Lowry’s magnificently ...”

“... on the use of the word hoor with a range of examples from the writings of Patrick Kavanagh, Brian Friel, Tim Pat Coogan, Oliver St John Gogarty, Neil Jordan and Hugh Leonard. It’s a method that seems to be at once academically sound and, for those committed to a long weekend in England and Wales carrying only one bag and one book, perfect for a bit of ...”

“... evolutionism of Lamarck. The point that Desmond brings out so well – drawing on the work of Martin Rudwick, Peter Bowler and Michael Bartholomew – is that Darwin’s Origin of Species actually caught Huxley on the wrong foot. If the future of scientific naturalism was, after all, to be bound up with an evolutionary theory, there was a respect in which ...”

“... met a similar fate. In 1995, Helen wrote to President Clinton; so did Margaret McKinney, whose son Brian had also been ‘disappeared’. Clinton’s intervention ensured that the issue became part of the negotiations that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. In 1999, the House of Commons set up a Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains which ...”

“... the eastern oil town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. (Granada Television had enlisted me to act as Brian Moser’s consultant on a World in Action documentary.) At La Esperanza, we found the commander, Major Ralph ‘Pappy’ Shelton, a Korean veteran, in an expansive mood. With a handful of senior American officers he was celebrating the end of the six-month ...”

“... For anyone with a teenage daughter their scabrous subject-matter is hard to take. They would scare Martin Amis. It needed a true appreciation of literary talent to spot their quality. The same true appreciation ensures that the prose in the LRB rarely falls below a certain standard and that the level of argument is kept up. Not all of the best LRB writers are ...”

“... Revolution in climate change, when a period of poor harvests acted as what the anthropologist Brian Fagan has called ‘a subtle catalyst’ for the insurrection. The tone of Antonio Stradivari’s violins has been attributed to the denser wood that trees lay down in cold weather. Incessant rain confined several English Romantics to Byron’s Swiss villa ...”

“... Joseph P. Kennedy. Jacobs paraphrases the Rat Pack’s foreign minister without portfolio, Dean Martin: ‘Wops, nigs, hebes, what the fuck was the difference? We were all up against the wall and fucking well better stick together.’As with Elvis Presley and Charlie Parker, you feel Destiny’s real leg-up was provided by the ferocious will of Sinatra’s ...”

“... about their echoes and consequences in the so-called real world. In this he would be unlike Brian De Palma, or the Coen brothers, who understand and exploit the shock value of violence; and even more unlike Oliver Stone, who has thought about violence and then forgotten what he thought. Tarantino in an interview (the same interview is excerpted in the ...”

“... introduced to by a friend. Each piece has a picture at the top drawn by the illustrator Charles Martin in the style of a fashion shoot. The words and music stand in for captions. ‘Le Golf’, for example, tells a story about a cocky colonel’s comeuppance on the links:The colonel is wearing shocking green ‘Scotch Tweed’.He will be victorious.His ...”

“... sound or dead recording sound’, a multitude of tracks laid down under the supervision of George Martin and Paul McCartney. And not long after the old production values have come under fire, so has the material itself. Again, the issue is mediation, a lack of feeling or veracity in the fanciful little narratives – ‘Eleanor Rigby’ comes to mind – that ...”

“... prisoners of war rather than regular inmates. The IRA leadership, which included Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, wanted a show of strength and it was perfectly willing to see its men starve themselves to death to make its point. The more intransigent the British were, the better, since the IRA was confident it had the greater appetite for the long ...”

“... the vocalist makes his entry. It’s Tony Bennett singing ‘From Rags to Riches’. The film is Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990). All kinds of things are going on here, artful, intelligent, violent and ironic. The broadest effect is that of the song, with its implication of a sarcasm as old as gangster movies themselves. Organised crime is a paradigm ...”