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“... knew Dylan wouldn’t be coming: substitution and displacement were therefore the order of the day. Not one Dylan but a dozen competing Dylan lookalikes, some of whom performed not Dylan songs but imitations composed for the occasion. Dylan was represented by the marketing of his ...”

“... No one has ever described motor neurone disease as a ‘very psychedelic experience’, as Neil Young (whose childhood nickname was ‘Shakey’) has described epilepsy. In a word, epilepsy is strange. It affects behaviour, sensation, belief and even personality. It changes people. It is also diagnostically indelible. Once someone has shown a ...”

“... as an arrogant opportunist, an inconsistent warmonger and a plagiarist (his speeches stole from Neil Kinnock and JFK). Age took the edge off him. Reaching the White House four years ago, he accomplished at 78 what he couldn’t manage at 45 or 65. Perhaps he’s been better at the job as a mellow old man than he would have been as a middle-aged hothead ...”

“... Untold Story of the Cash for Questions Affair will not be published until the week before polling day. If the serialised extracts in the Daily Telegraph are anything to go by, Greer’s book, too, is long on self-justification and short on revelations. Yet Greer does give us a glimpse of what was going on in the Parliamentary Tory Party in the ...”

“... was a Tory grandee who owned a house on the Costa Brava. Venturing forth to an art gallery one day, who should he meet but a hippy. The hippy was a beautiful young lady, rather thin but very clean, and she was known to her friends as Shoe. Shoe had wandered in many lands, pursued various trades and callings, sampled most of the religions of the earth and ...”

“... was there a republican majority, but the once loyal Scotsman was falling into the grip of Andrew Neil, one of the brashest anti-Royal voices in the Carlton debate. Most commentary about the programme was fearfully disapproving: crass, vulgar, ill-judged, a ‘tasteless screaming-match’ and so on. The Independent Television Commission later supported such ...”

“... if you were to yell ‘VAT’ another third would start making for the exits. You could spend all day showing these lads off-colour invoices. Most of them would marvel that anything had actually been put on paper. For fans like these the worst that might be said of Tel is that he got a bit above himself, out of his depth. But then again: so what? He had a ...”

“... muses Frank Bascombe, heir apparent to Rabbit and the narrator of Richard Ford’s Independence Day) and gangs and drugs are just as plentiful as in the inner city, stories of contemporary suburbia no longer serve our appetite for myth. Allusions to simpler times crop up in everything from the retro white-picket fence homes of ‘new ...”

“... rain and wind, an anomalous centre to circles lost to sight.The archaeologists Duncan Garrow and Neil Wilkin have devised an inspired complement to the Wiltshire visitor experience. Entering The World of Stonehenge, their exhibition at the British Museum (until 17 July), you swap the breadth and breathiness of Salisbury Plain for a winding path through ...”

“... we went to a brief concert at the Festival Hall, such events taking place regularly throughout the day as well as at night, in order to show off both the architecture and the acoustics. I thought then, aged 17, that it was the most exciting building I’d ever been in, playful, inventive, the only experience that compared with it in wonder when I went as a ...”

“... On a typical day​ , John Henry Salter would rise to shoot wildfowl at dawn. A GP in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy for 65 years (he died in 1932, aged 91, while still working as the local doctor), he ministered to his patients in the morning, tended his dogs and plants in the afternoon, gave his evenings to committees, and seldom went to bed without completing his diary ...”

“... Forty-two bishops stayed silent. The overwhelming consensus during, and after, the ten-day life-span of Mr Parkinson’s public downfall had seemed to be that this was not a matter of moral concern – not in this day and age. The names of Lawson, Brittan, Hurd, Fowler, Chalker and Ridley were produced – all ...”

“... on his nose. Here he is sniffing the air at the 1990 Wembley concert for the released Mandela: Neil Kinnock sat puffing a pipe, trying to look as people as possible. Jesse Jackson ... with shiny hair and shiny moustache and a camel’s-hair coat and a nose for the television-lens like a fly for shit: each time the camera looked his way he was on his feet ...”

“... hidden and now was seen. So: beautiful. As the deserted landscape of the moon was beautiful when Neil Armstrong’s camera panned across its uninviting surface. At the same time as these visual feasts were going on in the Women’s Group hut on a disused Freightliner site, I was working in the hut next door, involved in running a Free School for a bunch of ...”

“... One day, in the early years of the 20th century, a poetically-minded young man from the Scottish borders called Christopher Murray Grieve walked to Ecclefechan, the birthplace of Thomas Carlyle. It wasn’t a long way, but his trek was a gesture of hero-worship to one of the greatest Scotsmen and largest egos of the previous century ...”