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“... Then one comes across the poem ‘Army’, published by the preternaturally far-sighted Howard Sergeant in the pamphlet Fleshweathercocks in 1973, when Duffy was just 18 years old. It begins: Hello mother! It’s your eldest son back from the nuclear war, well, half of me anyway. How are you mother? Oh it’s good to see you too, considering ...”

“... with de haut en bas mimicry reminiscent of Ford Madox Ford’s attempts to enter the minds of sergeant-majors. It ends with a throb of sentimental patness: And those last months when she was really bad, They were the only pleasures that she had. In between are some moments of classic Betjeman: crushing bereavement, memories of touching happiness derived ...”

“... hatreds and prejudices. And an arrogance tempered their ingrained American idealism.’ His sergeant observed that during the Korean War, he had seen men sight in their rifles by firing at farmers: ‘Before you leave here, sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average 19-year-old American boy.’ He was ...”

“... said.’ According to the Observer of 10 July 1984, ‘he won a Distinguished Conduct Medal as a sergeant in the Somerset Light Infantry in 1914.’ It was Laurence Marks who dug up the last of these career alternatives. Marks, a most scrupulous journalist, had interviewed Archer and then thought he should check his father’s precise status in the Army. The ...”

“... Trafalgar Square were stopped four times, searched for drugs and racially abused. A woman police sergeant reports here: ‘I’ve experienced severe problems because, on more than a couple of occasions, I wouldn’t sleep with the senior officers. If you say no, they take it as a personal insult; and no matter what they say, they really do take it out on ...”

“... a personal appearance in the final story, ‘To die in Copenhagen’. The narrator of the tales is Howard Murray, a Scottish playwright, who travels to Denmark, as well as Dublin, London and New York in the course of the book. Tom Gallagher is himself a Scottish playwright, best-known as the author of Mr Joyce is leaving Paris: he has written other plays, two ...”

“... and a pinstripe suit’. ‘Now we don’t want to see no John Wayne performances out here,’ a sergeant tells his platoon in Vietnam. We see them anyway, collected in Slotkin’s book and in Warrior Dreams (1994) by James William Gibson. When Philip Caputo joined the Marines, he saw himself ‘charging up some distant beachhead, like John Wayne in Sands of ...”

“... to have fared badly. I’ve always thought the house in the original television series, Castle Howard, was ill-chosen, though it’s a mistake the new version replicates. I may have told this story before (I feel I’ve told most stories before), but when Derek Grainger, the producer of the TV version, asked me to adapt it he admitted a little shamefacedly ...”

“... at Wembley Arena. They got their way: the plans were shelved by Clarke’s successor, Michael Howard, in order to ‘avoid all-out war with the police’.After Labour came to power in 1997, the Blair government offered the police a new settlement. Funding increased by a quarter between 2001 and 2010, and there were a range of new powers such as ASBOs, in ...”

“... by his friend Richard Brooks, and his memories of Camp Pendleton, where he had served as a drill sergeant in 1944 and 1945, brought the character close to home. ‘I know that son of a bitch,’ he said of the brutal anti-Semite in the script, named Montgomery. ‘No one knows him better than I do.’ Montgomery looks as if he was born in uniform, and is ...”

“... man investigating the Harry Lime affair, Major Calloway, a figure wonderfully played by Trevor Howard in the movie. His indifference must be a mask, of course. Deep within him, as any dictionary of clichés will tell us, there are surely layers of kindness and moral concern. But what a mask. Calloway’s apparent willingness to expect the worst of people ...”

“... Second War such as those of Nancy Mitford and James Lees-Milne is Stuart Preston, nicknamed the Sergeant, an American serviceman who came over to work at US HQ in London, later taking part in the invasion. He seems to have very rapidly become a feature of the upper-class English social scene, setting hearts of both sexes a-flutter. Lees-Milne notes ...”

“... and Essie Craxton, who tumbled up in a ramshackle household in St John’s Wood. Elizabeth Jane Howard, who knew them all when she was young and later wove them into her Cazalet novels, described the Craxtons as exuding happiness like pollen, which rubbed off. The pianist Harold Isaacs remembered overcrowded Acomb Lodge as ‘a very strange house’, adding ...”

“... press with the result that the civil servants responsible received a slating from Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, and a new policy was instituted, barring the transfer of any prisoner without ministerial approval. The whole process then went into low gear as transfers were delayed or refused altogether. In January 1995, in an effort to prevent the ...”

“... by Eric Hiscock in the Bookseller). Duffy is a bisexual private detective, formerly a detective sergeant covering Soho. He becomes mixed up in complicated skulduggery involving a porn king and the bent superintendent who fitted him up and got him dismissed from the force. After a number of adventures with men, women and a seven-year-old boy (the only person ...”