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“... reporting became gloriously addictive. Two of the paper’s greatest investigative reporters were Jack Newfield and Mary Nichols. My (no doubt screen) memory is of them sitting hunched over their desks, a telephone clipped to each ear, receiving dirt from some informant at the end of one wire, and checking it with a reliable source on the other. For Newfield ...”

“... Five poets performed. Kenneth Rexroth, the consigliore of radicalism, was master of ceremonies. Jack Kerouac, too self-conscious to read, acted as cheerleader: ‘Go! Go! Go!’ He passed out slopping gallon jugs of Californian Burgundy. There had been poetry readings in the Bay Area before this and the Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had ...”

“... Buzz Aldrin became the first men on the Moon and less than a year before the Apollo 17 astronauts Jack Schmitt and Gene Cernan became the last. Between July 1969 and December 1972, 21 astronauts left on Apollo missions to put men on the Moon; 12 actually walked on the lunar surface, of whom nine are still alive. Each mission was made up of three men, one of ...”

“... to play Scripps the religious boy, and doesn’t even bother to mention that he plays the piano; Andrew Knott from Wakefield, who comes in like the wind has blown the door open and knows the scene off by heart, as do several of the others. This is new, as actors would normally expect to read the scene and if they are bad readers, as many actors are, this ...”

“... began to make an important contribution to steamboat revenues, though, as the marine historian Andrew Clark notes, ‘it was the enthusiastically reported visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1847 that glamorised and popularised the West Highlands for the wider world, opening up the region’s commercial potential for keen-eyed ...”

“... of Iraq, sat in the garden of his Baghdad villa while a young internet entrepreneur called Jack Dorsey tried to persuade him that he needed to be on Twitter. Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was in Baghdad at the invitation of the State Department. Over the previous three days, he and eight other Silicon Valley bigwigs, kitted out with helmets and flak ...”

“... up their two children: Paul, the historian and author of There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, and Darla-Jane, a dress designer and teacher (Gilroy herself looks super stylish in the photographs in this book; her outfits have been included in exhibitions at the V&A). It isn’t hard to see in Paul Gilroy’s work his mother’s refusal of racial ...”

“... Reader bears the inscription: ‘Steal not this book for fear of life for the owner has a big jack-knife.’ Jackson’s sharpest insight is that annotations buttonhole not only the author of the printed book, but future readers of the marked-up copy, who can respond by preserving (Southey traced over Coleridge’s pencil jottings in ink) or destroying (a ...”

“... community’ of Scotland only exist completely in song? Can it live by culture alone? Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, a bitter opponent of the 1707 Union, quoted a famous saying: ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ The novelist James Robertson loves this; he complains that ...”

“... Abbey’ since those were built in the 18th century. Barker’s book makes fruitful use of Andrew Prescott’s doctoral thesis on the judicial records of the rising and Carolyn Fenwick’s three-volume edition of the poll tax returns of 1377, 1379 and 1381. One striking fact to emerge is the degree to which the poll tax of 1381 was evaded: what ...”

“... in the postwar years. By far the greatest military figure wartime Britain produced was Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the victor of Taranto and Cape Matapan, whose remit it was, as commander in chief of the Mediterranean theatre, to protect the British army in North Africa. Yet there is no mention of Montgomery in Cunningham’s autobiography, A Sailor’s ...”

“... McAlister spoke, he was bouncing a sharpened pencil against the surface of the desk, a Union Jack pencil. I asked him if the presence of cameras didn’t just cause crime to be displaced. Didn’t people just go to places where there were no cameras? ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but we’re beginning to cover the blind spots. We have four mobile units. When we ...”

“... to create is played out. His findings are damning. On 5 October 1965, as the massacres began, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, Britain’s Ambassador in Jakarta, told the Foreign Office: ‘I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.’ On the following day, the Foreign Office in ...”

“... reading (a rule that holds true across genres, whether it’s Harry Potter, Fifty Shades of Grey, Jack Reacher or Sally Rooney). There are layers on layers of familiarity, in other words, in both text and paratext, for readers to sink into that keep them coming back for more.Each of the later books in the series has another layer of familiarity, of ...”

“... systems. Slap on a pair of dermatrodes, punch the keys on your cyberspace deck, and you ‘jack in’, propelling your disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination of the matrix. The fastest kids on the virtual block are the console cowboys, ‘casing mankind’s extended electronic nervous system, rustling data and credit’, and always ...”