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“... symmetry, if the paper that did so much to help her finally and inadvertently helped do her in. Pete Davies’s lively book, All played out, shows part of the high price our polity is paying for the behaviour of newspapers like the Sun. The book tells the story of the England football team’s campaign to win the 1990 World Cup; to write it, ...”

“... prospect which has been discussed – in semifictionalised, prophetic fashion – in the novels of Pete Davies, Dick Morland and others,3 and it is also an operative assumption of the controversial films of Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi and of Steve Bell’s Maggie’s Farm cartoons. It may be that an unlivable and impoverished public sphere – where ...”

“... incidentally, as much the lunatic behaviour of their drummer, the late and lamented Keith Moon, as Pete Townshend’s songs of adolescent rebellion that won them column inches. Moon was juvenile, a jester from Wembley who delighted in pranks. But the group was remarkable for other things. While the Beatles accomplished a smooth crossing-over into show ...”

“... to such a strategy. The chief writer and executive producer on the new Doctor Who is Russell T. Davies, the Welsh writer previously known for Queer as Folk (1999), Channel 4’s energetic, unusually active drama about young gay men in Manchester, and for the view, as expressed to a journalist, that the motor of all narrative is sex. Before ...”

“... rock music. Literary critics have not taken kindly to the several albums of songs he wrote with Pete Atkin, and I don’t feel able to assess them myself. But this indifference has been largely an averting of eyes from what we understand only partly and a turning of our gaze to the many other departments of art James excels in. The rock press, however, has ...”

“... why they were so singular at the time and still sound so convulsively fresh today. If Ray Davies was a Mod, it was only one of many pre-emptive masks he sported. (And ‘sported’ is definitely the word.) The Union Jack draped around the Kinks was thorny collage not breezy appliqué. Beneath the lilt and fizz of the group’s sound, ...”

“... more clearly in its originality, and is more widely influential today than ever before (Maxwell Davies is much preoccupied in his recent work with Sibelius). Lambert’s high, perceptive estimation of Kurt Weill (‘almost the only composer who can evoke in music the odd, untidy, drably tragic background that is presented to us so forcibly by William ...”

“... Poetry written in dialect seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Tony Harrison has made extensive use of Northern idioms. Tom Paulin has been busy raiding Ulster (and, I suspect, Scottish) dictionaries. Craig Raine has produced a manifesto, ‘Babylonish Dialects’, on dialect’s behalf. And several of the books under review here – by Scots, Welshmen and British West Indians – cannot be read without the glossaries which they thoughtfully provide ...”