“... he tested the rare limits of his individual talent. When teams discovered no single player could mark him, they sent two or three or four defenders at him, and he worked out ways between or around or over them, and scored and scored and scored. But his club kept losing in the final stages, against the ‘bad boys’ of Detroit, uglier but more disciplined ...”

“... Brits like Richard Long and Gilbert and George, on old bugbears like Warhol and Richard Hamilton. Shortly before Fuller’s death, he thought the tide was turning: Serota seemed to be coming into line, even Saatchi was investing in the School of London. Then it turned right back. In his last completed book, Theoria: Art and the Absence of ...”

“... on the evidence of Lewis’s perceptive and absorbing biography, that verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to Cliveden in 1936, complaining about the ‘ghastly unreality about it all … like living on the stage of the Scala theatre ...”

“... profit, to be obtained through the collection of fees and opportunities for patronage.The aim of Mark Knights’s book is to explain why Britain took so long to move from the old conception of office-holding to our present one by showing how the issue was debated over more than two centuries. A historian of the 17th century by training, Knights stresses that ...”

“... she was ‘as good a woman as ever was born’. Royal memorabilia had recently become popular. To mark the wedding, loyal subjects could decorate their homes with wallpaper block-printed with half-length portraits of Charles and Catherine, surrounded by cherubs.How could Catherine negotiate a strange court that was just out of exile and described as a ...”

“... James Melville with the poet’s own experience of motherhood: the pay-off is too much like an Ian Hamilton poem (arms damp with flowers ‘from holding them so long’), but the narrative leaps and elisions make this a powerful poem about mothers and sons. There are some entertaining pieces about sex, too, one describing a wicked old neighbour at the baths ...”

“... Group, the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his ...”

“... bands, bebop quartets and Black Country dance bands; for a while I was the token white in the Andy Hamilton Caribbean Combo.’ He played in jazz clubs, town halls, village halls, strip clubs, dance halls, drinking clubs and hotels. None of this work finds its way into the poetry, at least directly, but being away from Birmingham for so long had given him an ...”

“... to those who know nothing else about its author and to some who don’t usually read poetry. Ian Hamilton edited a selection of Lewis’s work, and there is a good biography by John Pikoulis. But his achievement has been hard to focus on. He moved quickly as a poet, and the poetry he wrote while on home service is markedly different from that written after ...”

“... contacts, not to mention a bounty of amazing beasts: wild mustangs from the American businessman Mark Dunham, panthers loaned by the animal exhibitor Carl Hagenbeck, three polar bears presented by a besotted Grand Duke Mikhailovich (the bears were said to pose on request).It​ is hard to exaggerate Bonheur’s fame in the mid-19th century, or the adulation ...”

“... stories of literary camaraderie or infighting. Ballard must have his reasons for dismissing Ian Hamilton, without deigning to name him, as a ‘self-important Soho idler’ who didn’t deserve Arts Council funding for the New Review, but the book would be more attractive without such spasms of sourness.) Ballard describes himself as an anti-establishment ...”

“... Founding Fathers – including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton – enjoy widespread, if superficial, public recognition. By comparison, key framers of the Reconstruction Amendments – James Ashley, Charles Sumner, Lyman Trumbull and Thaddeus Stevens – are obscure. Unfamiliar, too, are the origins and back stories ...”

“... his own bullet-points into company with their resounding dénouement, a bullet that clipped its mark. The iconography of his fist-pump and bloodied face immediately became the image he had waited for all his life, as – on the floor, with mad bravery and media savvy beyond the bounds of reason – he prepared for the photo-op. ‘Let me get my ...”

“... of Rights to amend the constitution. The driving force at the meeting in New York was Alexander Hamilton. His draft bill declared that ‘the people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable’ (‘bulwarks of ...”

“... laureate, John Masefield, and set to music by the Irish composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Hamilton Harty. They were Edwardian popular songs of the sort that Bartell D’Arcy might have been asked to sing in ‘The Dead’, when he wasn’t having a go at ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, or even Molly Bloom, on her concert tours in the North of Ireland in ...”