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“... Nick Kent is described on the cover of The Dark Stuff as ‘the living legend of rock journalism’. His status as legend is less to do with the quality of his writing than with his wilful mirroring of the self-destructive, drug-centred lives led by the rock stars he writes about. Kent made his name in the mid and late Seventies as a strung-out stringer, the suburban boy getting high with Keith Richards, hanging out at backstage drug binges, and – on one memorable occasion – being beaten about the body by Sid Vicious wielding a rusty bicycle chain ...”

“... the hipper glossies. On the back of more heavily puffed recyclings by other NME veterans such as Nick Kent and Julie Burchill, that brief pre-Thatcher Waterloo sunset in the IPC tower has taken on a rosy apocalyptic glow. These are not the uncorseted, feelgood ramblings of Sixties survivors (Howard Marks, Richard Neville et al), but the ...”

“... blinded a girl in one eye. At another gig, he used a bicycle chain to batter the NME rock writer Nick Kent, once McLaren’s friend and briefly the guitarist in an early incarnation of the Pistols. When Vicious replaced Matlock, McLaren wrote in a telegram to the NME that Sid’s ‘best credential was he gave ...”

“... writing his memoirs on retirement. Today serving officers appear to suffer no untoward restraints. Nick Vaux, who led 42 Commando Royal Marines in the Falklands, waited only for his brigadier, Julian Thompson, to write No Picnic before weighing in with March to the South Atlantic. Vaux is now a general. He writes lucidly, robustly, as befits a soldier, but is ...”

“... when they found they were out of their depth. Richard managed to reach the shore, shouting to Nick that he should swim to land and not try to touch bottom, but Nick’s head disappeared and didn’t come up again.The Beard family shut down individually and as a group. By his own reckoning, Richard didn’t say his dead ...”

“... it seems he was worried about how his notoriety was affecting his family and his career. His son, Nick, had followed him to Highgate School and was being mocked by classmates about ‘my father the jailbird’. Alongside his political activities, Comfort had been developing a reputation in the new field of gerontology, which was now under threat. After ...”

“... organised than this allows; apart from anything else, such a belief generates more exciting copy. Nick Cohen, the Observer columnist and author of What’s Left: How the Left Lost Its Way (2007), has called them ‘a vicious movement’ and ‘the smallest and nastiest of the Trotskyist sects’ (the latter in a piece from 2002 that prophetically notes how ...”

“... alpha male with a deep trench of damage in his right leg after a motorcycle collision on the Old Kent Road. He is dressed in a sack of a suit covered with marker-pen Enochian symbols. On his head is a reindeer herdsman’s pointed felt cap with earflaps, like a Norman battle helmet reconfigured by Joseph Beuys. It is warm. Kötting’s thick white gypsum ...”

“... a wonderful house within easy walking distance of the House of Commons, a mansion in his Kent constituency, a Jaguar. In return, Aitken put himself entirely at the Prince’s disposal. He would do anything, his secretary reported, to ‘keep the Arabs happy’. He would even help to provide them with what they were denied at home by their wives and ...”

“... chivalry’s rituals: Dr Keen has a nice story of the ‘vamping’ of the Black Prince by Joan of Kent and he emphasises that Lancelot was instructed in the mysteries of knighthood by the Lady of the Lake: ‘a great lady of regal family and endowed with magical powers, but not a priest’. The mysteries of knighthood and woman fused in the thus doubly ...”

“... to have governed the afterlife of other images. Two compelling photos from the Vietnam War era – Nick Ut’s 1972 photo of the naked girl running from a napalm attack, and John Filo’s shot of a girl screaming over a dead body at the 1970 Kent State shooting – generated narratives that would ultimately dampen any sense ...”

“... the role of small creatures, like beetles and mice, at the expense of big ones – derisorily nick-named ‘charismatic megavertebrates’ or ‘cuddlies’. He and I agree that many ‘landscapes’ in modern zoos are a sham: bad for the animals, useless for conservation. Gorillas, for example, may be shown these days among vague miscellanies of ...”

“... Channel Tunnel in 1994 by observing that at least visitors to the UK would have time to admire the Kent countryside that plans for what is now HS1 were pursued in earnest. Along with Eurostar, the 67-mile line now carries domestic trains to various locations in Kent as well as a couple of freight trains at night. The ...”

“... When​ Crimewatch first aired on the BBC in the mid 1980s, its presenter Nick Ross promised: ‘This is about real-life crime, not the stuff of fiction.’ Nowadays the distinction is rather less clear, and our screens are filled with true crime dramas that seem to offer both. They are essentially factual – ‘based on real events’ – but they have the feel of fiction ...”

“... stonewall tenacious efforts by Watson, his fellow Labour MP Chris Bryant and the Guardian reporter Nick Davies to show that Mulcaire and Goodman were fall-guys. The Press Complaints Commission meanwhile proved it was dysfunctional by devoting an entire report in November 2009 to a sardonic dismissal of Davies’s painstaking investigation. In desperation, the ...”