“... opinions, particularly about the Forties and Fifties. We won’t find, for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish ...”

“... terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and each deserves the gratitude of those ...”

“... can reward close attention without being recast. The book collects the words of Ian Curtis, the singer in Joy Division, who committed suicide in 1980 at the age of 23. Joy Division belonged to the scene that emerged into the space left behind by punk. They are now part of the global adolescent ether as well as a staple of middle age. Last Christmas you ...”

“... example, on a film poster in which Nat King Cole is airbrushed from his seat and the blonde white singer left standing beside the piano without an accompanist. The idea was to entertain, raise spirits, to report on the talent pouring out of the townships, the energy, the razzmatazz, the musicians, the athletes, the boxers, the wide boys, the extraordinary ...”

“... with a short biography, in the recently reissued In ‘Vanity Fair’, by Roy Matthews and Peter Mellini).* When she was 20 she was painted by G.F. Watts, who was besotted with her and called her his Bambina. At the height of her notoriety she was caricatured in Punch and elsewhere. In her last days she had a deathbed photograph taken of herself, all ...”

“... It turned out that the diminutive comedian was only one of the stars that interested the singer, the more tangential the better. On another occasion, also on the doorstep, his opening question was: ‘Does the name Avis Bunnage mean anything to you?’ So, reading Shaun Bythell and ever helpful, it occurs to me that, though the ...”

“... became the leader of the Soviet Union’s most successful jazz band. ‘Like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer,’ Frederick Starr observed in Red and Hot, his wonderful history of Soviet jazz, Utyosov ‘seized on the new American music as a means of establishing a niche for himself in the non-Jewish world’. In fact, according to a visiting British ...”

“... book, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (1984), was a painstaking re-creation of the life of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. He topped that with an account of Fred and Rosemary West’s killing careers, Happy like Murderers (1998). The first resembles a documentary; the second is more like a novel in the sense of being more artfully shaped and ...”

“... the vulgarisation of Christianity, is a barn-door that has been riddled repeatedly by the likes of Peter Simple. The influence of Evelyn Waugh – the Waugh of Decline and Fall – is so marked as to be oppressive. The characters are facetiously named – Father Sporran, the Dundee of Caik, Professor Hairbrush (a philosopher – get it?). Since satire invites ...”

“... expects and will pay for his presence. Michael Jackson Live? It’s a no-brainer, securing the singer a kind of higher existence – a freedom from quibbling reality – that the real Jackson tried to have all his life but could only dream of in a terrifying series of Neverlands.Dead 2Pac appeared at Coachella on 15 April 2012, a Sunday. The night ...”

“... contemporary British fiction, listening to the Rolling Stones one minute, and the Pakistani qawali singer Nasrut Fatah Ali Khan the next. Chad – a hardline Muslim trying to forget a slightly shady past – insists that ‘pop music is no good for me. Nor for anyone... I used to be a music addict... it was overtaking my soul,’ yet he can’t stop himself ...”

“... rates and restrictions on currency movements was to deal with a crook called Kourillo, ‘a Peter Lorre character’ who was ‘barely five feet tall’ and had a handshake ‘like an empty glove’. (When Kourillo later betrayed him, Fry took out a murder contract and forced him out of Marseille.) A strange and colourful group assembled in ...”

“... To fit these commentaries, and later exegesis, notably by the 12th-century bishop of Paris Peter Lombard, onto the page in such a way that they could be studied alongside the psalms or other books of the Bible was a steep design challenge. The Morgan collection includes a vast four-volume glossa ordinaria – standard gloss – complete with chains and ...”

“... and its denizens were always ghosts. It only existed as a ragged story and an old tune, one each singer could make his own. Nothing in Soho ever quite happened, and the place was always passing into song. Up a grubby set of stairs, ShangriLa was believed to exist, a perfect afternoon of vodkas in a happy land above the banality of everyday custom and ...”

“... teacher, with whom she has ‘tremendous rows about her progressive approaches to teaching’. Peter’s Benthamite training has rendered him ‘traditional ... conformist ... reductionist ... mechanist’ (another lexicon of Holbrookian dirty words). Psychologically Peter has ‘buried the boy within him, very ...”