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“... Lord Roll is a very distinguished man, who has levitated over a period of 70 years or so from a small village in an obscure corner of Central Europe to the topmost rank of the British Establishment. He has had three separate careers. First he was an academic, writing among other things A History of Economic Thought, a valuable introduction to the subject still in print almost 50 years after its first publication ...”

“... From the 11th century to the 19th not a single Eric was to be found in England, according to the Harrap Book of Boys’ and Girls’ Names. Then in 1858 the schoolmaster Frederic Farrar, not yet a dean, published that passionately morbid tale Eric, or Little by Little. This was the book which, in the face of much mockery, put the wind up two generations of youth ...”

“... imbued with the influence of black music, and never more so than since the rise of rock and roll in the mid-Fifties. Indeed, since the days of ragtime the popular music business could not have existed without this continuous infusion. The jazz which was discovered as a heavyweight art in the late Twenties by little groups of impassioned aficionados, was ...”

“... Ray Charles, whom I had first heard as one of a handful of whites in a corner of a vast rock-and-roll dance in Oakland, California, when he was still known only to the black public. They did not dance much while he sang. By now not quite a major pop star but already a hipster saint, fourth in line to Lester Young, Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, and ...”

“... a Republican, that New Deal liberalism truly became institutionalised. Rather than seeking to roll back liberalism, Eisenhower presided over the extension of Social Security benefits to ten million predominantly black agricultural and domestic workers who had initially been excluded from the programme at the insistence of powerful Southern Democrats in ...”

“... DeCurtis. DeCurtis, a senior features editor at Rolling Stone, and editor of Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture (an anthology which includes some excellent essays and, thankfully, reveals a broader range of views than the editor’s), confesses in his introduction to the collection: ‘It [is] hard to convey to someone who has grown up in the late ...”

“... with rounded two-storey nose and lower wings’. In front of it stands a column carved by Eric Kennington with images of flight and surmounted by a model of the Comet racing plane. The 1952 flight test hangar and the control tower are still standing, though the aerodrome closed in 1993 to become a business park.My half-brother, nearly a generation ...”

“... forty years of right-wing military dictatorship. In his introduction to John Kemble’s journal, Eric Nye accuses Greene of underestimating the seriousness of the Apostles. He reckons Greene had been misled by Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling, in which the Spanish venture is all about sorcerers’ apprentices wreaking mischief with Coleridgean mystical ...”

“... of them smoking. I also recall watching Casablanca at the theatre in Leeds University and smoking roll-ups throughout – a Virginia tobacco called The Ringer Returns, which came in a blue and yellow tin with the feathered head of an American Indian chief in a red roundel at the centre. I would be hard pressed now to roll a ...”

“... to the Dictionary of National Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own jokes. Amiable images, devised no ...”

“... times before releasing their euphoric version of ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’. With Cream, Eric Clapton transformed ‘Cross Road Blues’ into a portentous rocker, then turned the song into his calling card, giving his box set the title Crossroads and starting the Crossroads Centre – a rehab centre on Antigua.It didn’t matter that next to nothing ...”

“... a useful, interesting disguise. He climbs buildings as if he were flying, his bandages unfurl and roll down to earth, caught by an admiring boy who returns them – ‘I brought your things, sir!’ – and fetches green corn-tips for the beast to eat. Sprinklers are hissing over the lawns and a fish is walking by the mareotic lake and a tree has shed its ...”

“... created here by Shakespeare’s Lost Play: ‘Edmund Ironside’. But by the time a copy of Eric Sams’s edition reaches me through theatrical hands, it’s been marked up and rejected. Understandably, because the play is dull and its attribution groundless. The verse is wooden and inert, yet the author’s verbal competence outstrips his dramatic ...”

“... are therefore wholly without previous experience of office? 1 January. Delighted to see a CH for Eric Hobsbawm and a CBE for David Lockwood in the New Year Honours. Would either have been honoured at all without the change of government? David, although Britain’s number one sociologist, is almost the only academic I know who is wholly without the vanity ...”

“... Adams’s eerie Wunderkammer at the beginning of the 20th. In this generally disappointing field, Eric Hobsbawm has entered the lists with a work he invites us to read as the ‘flip side’ of Age of Extremes, his great history of the 20th century: ‘not world history illustrated by the experiences of an individual, but world history shaping that ...”