“... historiography turns out on closer inspection to be a hostility to anything and everything said by Jack Plumb. The unwary reader might wonder how Plumb comes to be bracketed with Macaulay, Lecky, Buckle and Christopher Hill; Plumb’s sympatheties are not those of Clark, but he relishes ‘high politics’ and concentrates as hard as any disciple of Maurice ...”

“... British targets, at least in the short-term, then the case has to be made that these losses are a price worth paying for the possibility of long-term benefits. It is not enough to argue, as Jack Straw did following the Madrid bombings, that ‘al-Qaida will go on and would have gone on irrespective of the war in Iraq, until ...”

“... Improving that was an engineering challenge, solved by two men, working separately. The first was Jack Kilby, an engineer newly hired by Texas Instruments. The company had gone into business making equipment to look for oil deposits using seismic waves, pivoted during the war to making sonar for the navy, and after the war was looking to expand into other ...”

“... with Christine Keeler. But of all the lies that have been told in the House of Commons, Jack Profumo’s denial of any ‘impropriety’ with Miss Keeler was surely the most trivial. Yet it had massive repercussions and did considerable damage to Harold Macmillan. In July 1963, in a brilliant article in the Spectator (which I then owned), Anthony ...”

“... officials the same April, he was told, sternly: “We must restore confidence.’ ‘What is the price of restoring confidence?’ countered Benn. ‘Well,’ replied the Stock Exchange chieftain. ‘You have got to have better dividend distribution, otherwise equities will collapse.’ The confidence which mattered could be measured only by the flow of ...”

“... the FEKS collaborators Kosintsev and Trauberg, the young Eisenstein (with his designs for Jack London’s The Mexican) and the quite forgotten Igor Terentiev – nearly all of whom came from Leningrad, the former capital – and drawing attention, too, to directors of the Berezil and Rustaveli (or Ukrainian and Georgian-language) theatres. However, he ...”

“... of which there were numerous Hollywood adaptations – made him a millionaire. Indeed, his price was about to go through the roof when, in 1946, he died of throat cancer at the age of 62 (or thereabouts; he always lied about his age). For the last months of his life he could not speak. But then he never did speak much. His son Damon Junior records, in ...”

“... a journalist, though the characterisation here is paper thin. ‘“I’ve been thinking,” Jack said after a brooding pause. “Perhaps my place is in Europe. Report from there. From the front line. Like Hemingway. Maybe even join the front line. The International Brigades. You know? Do something. This idleness is killing me.”’ A paragraph like ...”

“... the usual limit), and earned $437,730 in prize money, a world record – nearly sixty times his price at auction. Seabiscuit: The Making of a Legend is framed by the story of the Santa Anita Handicap, the ‘hundred-grander’ founded as the world’s richest purse in the Depression, when horse-racing seemed to offer some excitement to millions newly ...”

“... a colleague at Aberystwyth who is also Plaid Cymru’s spokesman on energy. ‘I’m on it with Jack McConnell,’ I said. ‘Who’s McConnell?’ ‘Scottish First Minister.’ ‘Well, I never . . .’ This was a benign version of the Jowett syndrome but serious enough: Westminster, Holyrood and Cardiff have become places apart. As the days tick away ...”

“... include even his own daughter-in-law. Things were always arranged so that the woman paid the full price of the indiscretion and Lloyd George got away scot-free. His wife, Margaret, at first resisted his proposal on the reasonable ground that she couldn’t trust him. Later, she put up with his multiple infidelities uncomplainingly and did most of the ...”

“... time in the local pubs.To prepare for their trip, Rosella has read Bernadette Devlin’s The Price of My Soul (1969). Watergate and the Troubles are referenced too, which makes Long Island no less 1970s than Brooklyn is 1950s. But, realist fiction though it is, it’s light on period detail and contemporary politics. Deeper divisions between the Old ...”

“... create a climate of excitement which finds Johnny Depp paying $ 15,000 for what purports to be Jack Kerouac’s old raincoat. The vendor cursed himself for letting the relic go so cheap: a soiled handkerchief was subsequently found in the pocket which could have been sold separately, or used to bump up the price tag by ...”

“... himself withdrew from circulation in the UK because of arguments about its depiction of violence; Jack Nicholson’s manic performance as writer-turned-axe-murderer: all of these images and associations, from Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1959), Dr Strangelove (1964), 2001 (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980) respectively, are ...”

“... has remained steadily loyal to jazz since the Thirties, and The Duke Ellington Reader is worth its price simply for Richard Boyer’s magnificent profile of the great man (‘The Hot Bach’), which first appeared there in 1944. It is safe to say that, at that time, in no American city outside New York would nightclubs like Café Society, militantly devoted to ...”