“... order. ‘Everyone thinks Star Wars came out in 1977,’ Baillie said. ‘In the US it came out in May 1977, but in Britain it was released on 26 December 1977, when it was shown in two London cinemas. In January 1978, it was shown in the big Scottish cities. Ayr finally got it in April.’When Baillie turned sixteen, the manager offered him a summer job, then ...”

“... system of all opioids: not just the heroin that resulted in the overdose, but any methadone they may have taken. This means that the user often wakes up ‘rattling’ and angry at the people who helped them. At the centre, the first response to a heroin overdose is to administer oxygen. Often this is enough to bring people round, but if it isn’t, and ...”

“... have (in general) chosen not to speculate about the substantial and important role that laughter may have played in the immediate and long-term reception of this literature.’ So this is a history of satire without the jokes. Sperrin derives his method of interpreting satirical texts from Quentin Skinner. He, like Skinner, aims to identify what a given ...”

“... undemocratic methods, Mélenchon’s adversaries charge him with authoritarian tendencies. Last May two centre-left journalists published a vitriolic pamphlet, La Meute (‘The Wolfpack’), which portrayed LFI as a one-man cult, where dissidents are quickly slandered and expelled. There is some truth to these accusations. LFI is a machine mostly designed ...”

“... murder should have strong emotions behind them’. To lament the worsening of standards in murder may be perverse, but the indiscriminate killings that now darken news bulletins – teenage stabbings, or the destructive consequence of neglected mental illness, or squabbles over drugs – recall Orwell’s point. They are terrifying because they seem to have ...”

“... of the very rich – Goldman chucks it all in, building and building so that in the end he may have the biggest target in the whole world to knock down all by himself. The book is already giving signs of being the product of an authorial megalomania poor Elvis could not have hoped to match. The mass-culture freaks of the world are evidently such ...”

“... met Charles’s sister Alice. They eventually returned together to America, and married in May 1929. By this time ‘Fuzzy’ was already seeing John Millet, psychiatrist, at the Austen Higgs Centre in Stockbridge. ‘Fuzzy’ was fatal. He was very handsome. He had genuine artistic talents. He insisted on the importance of extreme physical ...”

“... there would be no reserves for use in other ways, such, presumably, as writing novels. Nowadays we may have got rid of deference, though expert friends assure me that degradation in erotic life has merely assumed different forms. What seems reasonably certain is that Gissing had it in something like the form outlined by Frend. When he was a student at ...”

“... is a disruption of the Western regime of names, genders and pronouns. The outline of the plot may be simply stated, though its capacity for generating complexity will also be apparent from the outset. A Japanese nobleman has two children, a boy and a girl. In their early years, these children start to adopt the demeanour and pastimes of the opposite ...”

“... have no baby; they have decided they don’t want kids – not now and perhaps never. This may be why Fran is edgy over the invitation, and inclined to talk tartly about taking Bud and his wife a present. Perhaps they should take a bottle of wine, and drink it themselves if their hosts don’t like it. Fran eventually settles for a loaf of her ...”

“... is a damning analysis of commercialisation.1 His story starts at the Royal Lancaster Hotel on 18 May 1992, when Sky Sports was in competition with Greg Dyke of ITV for the Premiership rights. ITV are said to have put up £262 million for five years, a deal which favoured the ‘big five’ clubs, who were guaranteed exposure. Alan Sugar, one of several ...”

“... documentation, which they concealed down a mineshaft while they bargained for their future. On 2 May, they surrendered to the Americans in Bavaria. A decade of American dithering followed. When the Russians put up Sputnik 1 in 1957, the message went direct to the Pentagon and the White House: ‘they’ had something that could carry a nuclear warhead to ...”

“... take in these new opportunities to taste ‘the pleasures of the imagination’. Georgian England may now, in our culture’s memory, be associated with ‘order, stability and decorum’, but ‘contemporaries saw their culture as modern, not traditional, an indication that their society and way of life was changing. It was its dynamism, variety and ...”

“... and acting in Character of a prudish Lady, he said: ‘Well, I don’t know what to think; Women may be honest that do such things, but for my Part I never could bear to touch any Man’s Flesh – except my Husband’s, whom perhaps,’ says he, ‘she wish’d at the Devil.’ Swift’s fleshly remarks are doubly ironic, considering the later sexual ...”

“... That so little has been written on later 19th-century Manchester, despite Taylor’s invitation, may (for once) be blamed on Asa Briggs, whose excellent Victorian Cities (1963) threw historians off the scent by arguing that Manchester, the ‘shock city’ of the first half of the century, had, by 1877, ‘long outgrown the days when it could be described as ...”