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“... cuttlefish – at which point she starts to enjoy it. This has a touch of Monty Python’s Life of Brian about it (‘You mean you were raped?’ Brian asks his mother; ‘Well, at first,’ she replies) but, unpalatable as this mode of ‘seduction’ is to modern sensibility, it’s how it’s done in classical myth, the ...”

“... Angels, racist shenanigans in local politics, meningitis, necrotising fasciitis. The birthplace of Brian Jones. The malign triangulation of royal residences.Meat and drink to Home who is gleefully stomping the bollocks out of what he perceives to be an effete and self-regarding culture. He gives the name of the professionally enraged right-wing ...”

“... made that ‘there had been a number of similar claims in the media and that the evidence of Dr Brian Jones’ – a senior government scientist – ‘showed that the report that there was concern in intelligence circles was correct.’9 As far as Lord Hutton was concerned, all this was neither here nor there. The ‘communication by the media of ...”

“... told me the DPRK had bartered missile technology for centrifuge blueprints from Pakistan. Brian Jones, who retired from the Defence Intelligence Analysis Staff of the Ministry of Defence just before the invasion of Iraq last year, and who gave evidence to the Hutton and Butler inquiries, has emphasised that the development of nuclear weapons ...”

“... in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and following useful love affairs with Alain Delon, Bob Dylan and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, was determined to get into music one way or another. The Velvet Underground managed to sneak away from Warhol without utterly alienating him, and became a real rock band, albeit an unusual one, with ever-changing ...”

“... be described as a novel. The Open Door is entangled with reality in a different way. Its hero, Brian Seaton, returns to his native Nottingham in 1949, after serving with the RAF in Malaya. Increasingly absorbed in reading and writing, he is directionless, reluctant to resume the pub-and-factory life he used to know. Before his demobilisation is ...”

“... a tendency to elongate into lists whenever possible (of the ‘there were ten things that Brian really disliked’ kind); kooky epigraphs, mixing high and low authorities; long, feverish run-on sentences, desperately semaphoring their gross mimetic appetite, their need to capture as much of ‘the madness of the times’ as possible, as much of ‘the ...”

“... Part​ of what makes Owen Jones such a phenomenally successful figure by left-of-Labour standards is his ability to be several things at once. He is both insider, reporting back to ‘us’ about what ‘they’ think, and outsider, as shocked and angry about it as ‘we’ might be. He was brought up in Sheffield, Falkirk and Stockport and speaks in a sharp Mancunian accent, but he is also an Oxford graduate, with all the connections that can entail ...”

“... cause against France. We know, too, that for a long time the Revolution was far from secure. D.W. Jones, whose War and Economy in the Age of William III belongs to that dying breed of works on economic history which non-specialists have a chance of understanding and enjoying, brings out the freak economic good fortune which enabled England, and thus its new ...”

“... according to Tim Heald, her latest biographer, who has previously committed to paper the lives of Brian Johnston,2 Denis Compton,3 Barbara Cartland4 and Prince Philip,5like the other four biographical subjects she was also a household word in her day. This had nothing to do with hard work and natural ability – as, I would argue, it did in the other four ...”

“... back an imaginary past, an epoch of freedom and justice. The phrase is not Hazlitt’s but Stanley Jones’s, and gives an idea of the crispness of Jones’s style, as the instance does of the erudition with which he has reached into every cranny of Hazlitt’s distracted polemical existence. His book is a monument of ...”

“... failed all his O-levels except art because he was too busy playing his sax. Born plain old David Jones in Brixton in January 1947, he grew up in Bromley, and spent his first years of struggling would-be stardom in Beckenham. He’d been in half a dozen bands as a saxophonist, a singer and a mime artist; he’d styled himself as a Mod, a hippy and a ...”

“... few. Yet almost at once there came rumblings from Cambridge. Maurice Cowling, John Vincent, Andrew Jones and others rightly emphasised the Victorian politician’s relative autonomy from popular pressure, and cleverly unveiled the feebleness of provincial and popular reformers when they tried to operate at Westminster or Whitehall. Since 1979 Thatcherite ...”

“... on Hindu law and Charles Wilkins’s pioneering translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. When Sir William Jones, the inspirational instigator of Indo-European studies, arrived in Bengal as a judge, Hastings was one of his strongest supporters. Though it has long been fashionable to denigrate such work as being Orientalist, it’s difficult to find anything in it that ...”

“... other three recent American war movies I know of: Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah (2007), Brian de Palma’s Redacted (2007) and the newly released Stop-Loss, directed by Kimberly Peirce. This is her second film, and in certain curious ways a follow-up to the troubling Boys Don’t Cry (1999) – she herself signals the continuity by having the main ...”