“... or at least attempted to satisfy, the improper requests.’ One man they tried to satisfy was Jack Warner, who as president of Concacaf (the football association of North and Central America and the Caribbean) was in control of three crucial votes. Warner wanted money to support grassroots football in his home country of Trinidad, which meant cash paid ...”

“... used as the advance guard for powerful states. The World for Sale starts in 2011 with the late Ian Taylor, chief executive of Vitol, on board a private jet, heading to Benghazi in Libya. Vitol, the world’s largest oil trading company, had been asked by the government of Qatar to deliver diesel, gasoline and fuel oil to the rebels fighting Gaddafi. In ...”

“... players like Pancho Gonzales, Rod Laver, Lew Hoad, Jaroslav Drobny, Frank Sedgman, Don Budge and Jack Kramer were as good if not better than the present lot – Sampras, Agassi, Moya, Kafelnikov, Rios and so on. The only first-class pre-World War Two player I ever saw was Henri Cochet, who had occasionally beaten the great Tilden in the Twenties. A ...”

“... furiously at work on an unwieldy treatise is a staple of his fiction (in JR a character named Jack Gibbs struggles over this very text), and over the years he wrote several essays on related themes (now collected with other occasional pieces in The Rush for Second Place). Then, in early 1997, Gaddis was diagnosed with terminal cancer, which prompted him ...”

“... asserting that he was the victim of a London faggot literary coterie, consisting of Martin Amis, Ian Hamilton and myself. (Amis and I contemplated a letter to the Face, saying that this was very unfair to Ian Hamilton, but then dumped the idea.) Now here is Mailer attempting the near-impossible: that is to say, a novel ...”

“... features him singing not only ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ and ‘Cocaine Blues’, but also the Jack Clement number ‘Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart’, which has the chorus, ‘I’ve been washed down the sink of your conscience/In the theatre of your love I lost my part/And now you say you’ve got me out of your conscience/I’ve been flushed ...”

“... In 1969, while he was serving a prison sentence for unlawful assembly, Ian Paisley sent this message to his congregation: I rejoice with you in the rich blessings of last weekend. I knew that our faithful God would pour out His bounty. In prayer in this cell I touched the Eternal Throne and had the gracious assurance of answered prayer ...”

“... for the New Millennium Experience, was once the resting place for the carpet-wrapped cadaver of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie. This sinister wasteland, first left out of the tunnel, marked the limits of Lambrianou’s imagination. And the close of an era, if not a millennium, of creative alliances between showbiz, disorganised crime and bent politicians. An ...”

“... none of whom Amis had much time for), as well as extensive collections of Stevenson and Jack London, the latter represented by 131,000 items. It has also purchased the archive of the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, Amis’s second wife. The Huntington’s Rare Book Room closes for an hour at noon and most of its readers stroll across the gardens to ...”

“... of science. Indeed, it’s popular even among some scientists. In The Collapse of Chaos, Jack Cohen (a biologist) and Ian Stewart (a mathematician) argue that the laws of nature are not ‘true’ in any real sense: ‘Our prized laws of nature are not ultimate truths, just rather well-constructed Sherlock Holmes ...”

“... I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’ Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: generator of life, origin of the city, a passage between ...”

“... differ, some of them wildly, but it seems to have been one track in particular, ‘Jack U Off’, that triggered most of the derision and homophobic barracking.)1 The rest of the band were game to push on, but Prince fled home to Minneapolis in a funk. If he was angry, it was perhaps most of all with himself: at some level he must have ...”

“... of British sailors lined up on the decks, in their crisp white uniforms, saluting the Union Jack, and apparently experienced some kind of Anglophile epiphany, from which he has not yet recovered. This story has often been related in the press here, but when I repeated it in Egypt people laughed. Mohamed, they said, may well have visited the docks and ...”

“... stench of the bodies left over from the battle fought there a few weeks before. Later that year, Ian Hamilton’s company of Gordon Highlanders, part of the River Column, endured ‘incessant toil’, rowing and wading waist-deep for hundreds of miles up the Nile in eleven small boats. After the Battle of Omdurman, the thirsty troops had to drink from ...”

“... Communist Party, made it all the more remarkable. Within a few weeks the Minister for Culture, Jack Lang, who was known to be close to Mitterrand and who had earlier, in a speech in Mexico, denounced the economic and cultural imperialism of the United States, was boasting of the Silicon Valleys that existed in France (partout chez nous, en Aquitaine, en ...”