“... and repaired church organs, mechanical pianos, music boxes and hurdy-gurdies’, David Sheppard records in his biography of Eno, On Some Faraway Beach (2008). Eno’s father, William, was a postman who repaired clocks and watches for pennies. Eno came of age at a time when you could still get a decent higher education without taking on ...”

“... Excalibur perhaps, links up the parts of the novel and is symbolic in its action. A Welshman, David Jones, runs away to sea, survives the sinking of the Titanic, becomes a cook in New York, marries Ludmilla, the daughter of his Russian employer, returns to Wales and the First World War. He is in Ireland during the Rebellion and, because he is posted as ...”

“... much controversy about ‘musical wallpaper’, though the exchanges quoted here between David Drew (deploring it), Hans Keller (finding paradoxical good in it) and Shawe-Taylor (thinking of benefits to the elderly) centre on the transmission of Haydn’s complete symphonies. Worse was to come, including Mainly for Pleasure. In the years leading up ...”

“... 1992 so that he could be present during the execution of a mentally retarded young man in Little Rock. I wish I believed that reading some of the descriptions in this book would cause him to reflect. They would clearly not impress Attorney General Bob Butterworth of Florida. Commenting on a recent case in which the mask of an electrocuted man caught ...”

“... new elite to hold on to power. Anyone who is unhappy can leave, rather than staying behind to rock the boat: far from being frightened that the disgruntled will vote with their feet, Putin and Co welcome it, because it secures their hold on power. This is the big difference between Putin’s Russia and its Soviet predecessor, which was terrified of ...”

“... painted in France in 1918, has the gawkiness of something noticed, not composed, while in David Cox’s Tour d’Horloge, Rouen it is not so much the architecture of the clock tower as the patch of bright light seen through the arch at its base that is the subject. This kind of observation, centring on light, weather and landscape, became a ...”

“... of animated nature into vocal praise: Ye Fish assume a Voice, with Praises fill The hollow Rock, and loud reactive Hill. Let Lions with their Roar their Thanks express, With Acclamations shake the Wilderness ... Apart from the great hymn-writers, the most engaging religious poets of the early 18th century can often seem to be the numerous but now ...”

“... The sculptor​ David Nash has lived and worked in Snowdonia for half a century, and the exhibition of his work currently on view at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff (until 1 September) is a tribute to his time in the region. Born in Surrey in 1945, he moved to the once flourishing slate-mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in 1967, the year he left Kingston School of Art ...”

“... but instead they look a bit tacky and amateurish: middle-aged, mothballed Thunderbird puppets. As David Stubbs puts it in Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany (2014), there is ‘the air of belonging to some bygone astronaut era, veterans of an abandoned space project.’ The fact that Kraftwerk have produced so little since the ...”

“... David Keenan’s​ first novel, This Is Memorial Device: An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978-86 (2017), documents the rise and fall of a fictitious (though awesomely real) band called Memorial Device. Its members are from Keenan’s home town of Airdrie – about thirteen miles east of Glasgow – and the book takes the form of 26 testimonies from band members, friends, jilted lovers, relatives, hangers-on and rival acts ...”

“... had been on the two earlier expeditions. He was acknowledged as one of the better British rock climbers and had proved himself at high altitude. Andrew Irvine was 22 and had no Himalayan experience, but he was adept at repairing oxygen apparatus, or what the expedition’s Sherpas laughingly referred to as ‘English air’. On his earlier ...”

“... they must strive for it themselves, not wait for the gentry to give it to them – these are the rock on which the Labour Party was built, and it was these who Clem not only represented, but came to personify ... Starting with conventional middle-class – and working-class – beliefs in king, Country and Empire, he had the vision to see how these ideas ...”

“... Eurosceptic ministers and former ministers, such as Iain Duncan Smith, Nigel Lawson and David Owen. Then there’s Grassroots Out, which was supposed to bring the other two lots together. But the prospectus on offer has been muddied because the spokesmen within each organisation have had different ideas. Johnson in particular changes his ideas once ...”

“... and asserting an imperial idea that once flourished in many places, but which now clings to the Rock of Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands and parts of the north-east counties of Ireland. The Gibraltar equivalent of Sir Joseph Cairns is a politician called Sir Joshua Hassan who believes that the Rock is indissolubly part of ...”

“... nowhere to be found. And so, this past summer, when I boarded a fast boat to Capri – that famous rock where Lenin and Adorno hiked, and where now those who can afford prices set for Russian oligarchs shop – I was not immune to the prospect that the good-looking captain in his tight white slacks might throw us to the sharks. I had decided that it is the ...”