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“... examiner and sat on committees. I had become the person I once impersonated. There were still Billy Liar moments: doodling in meetings, dreaming up titles for novels, imagining the present as prelude. But the masquerade was over. What I did was who I was.Then, two years ago, things took a turn. A viable application for a big research grant fell at the ...”

“... of Fiume in 1919, in which the poet and his cohorts seized the town for fifteen months in the name of free love, anti-feminism and publicly funded music (D’Annunzio later described him as a ‘beloved comrade in arms’). By 1920 Teruzzi was back in Milan, one of more than a million veterans adrift in a nation that had little use for them, living with ...”

“... most high-spirited of stories? (‘ “I say you fellows, it’s a lark, isn’t it?” chortled Billy Bunter.’) Drotner doesn’t seem to have studied her material with sufficient attention to grasp the characters of the boys – or, come to that, the names of all the girls, once she reaches the equivalent female papers, the School Friend and the rest of ...”

“... taxi-driver; the exotic and much fêted André Previn was plain ‘Mr Preview’ – the name by which, he told McCann, he is still known to many London cab-drivers more than twenty-five years after appearing on the show. This is the levelling down on which the British like to pride themselves, that sometimes aggressive way in which egalitarianism is ...”

“... I first started writing headlines 70 years ago, but in my time we did not indulge in first-name familiarities on the lines of ‘Sidney Goes to the Gallows’ and ‘Ann (90) Fells Burglar.’ This first-naming of all and sundry is the curse of the age and is rendered no more acceptable by the fact that nurses and policemen do it. I ...”

“... the executive suite. In 1965, the penthouse still had enough ‘unheard-of glamour’ to lend its name to a new men’s magazine. There’s a great deal to admire in Bernard’s integration of evidence of various sorts, from building regulations and operator manuals to high literature, into a shrewd and versatile account of the transformative effect of the ...”

“... some of which were multistorey ‘crack malls’, complete with smoking rooms and even crèches. Billy Joe Chambers directed his sales teams to make the addicts ‘feel good’ about spending welfare money needed for diapers or formula on crack. The ways cultures either adapt to new intoxicants, integrating their effects into cohesive rituals, or fail to, so ...”

“... to continue their careers at Westminster rather than become jumped-up parish councillors in what Billy Connolly called Scotland’s ‘wee pretendy parliament’. Of the party heavyweights, only Donald Dewar, a necessary replacement for Robertson, who had performed one obsequious gyration too many as shadow Scottish secretary, returned to a political career ...”

“... since vanished from the movie-making scene. ‘No profession of producer really exists today,’ Billy Wilder said. ‘Most producers make you feel that if only they weren’t quite so busy and not quite so involved in six enormous projects which are going to revolutionise the cinema, they could write your picture better. They could direct it better. They ...”

“... brings us back to The Old School and the schooldays of Simon Raven. When he was not studying his Billy Bunter comics, young Raven was reading The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s, a more grown-up story, concerned with the maintenance of esprit de corps in a gang-torn community. The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s was against the Sixth Form, the seniors were against ...”

“... old Irish-speaking one. ‘Valentine Brown’, as these purists saw it, was the sort of ludicrous name an arriviste landowner might call himself – someone who’d installed himself in a demesne of the great McCarthys, now dead or dispersed. In this world, the speaker of ‘cunning English’ quickly got himself condemned for opportunism, everything English ...”

“... strangled destinies of ordinary people. Last summer, I went to Jimmy Reid’s funeral in Govan. Billy Connolly, once an apprentice in the same shipyard, told a story about going for walks with Reid in Glasgow. ‘He’d point to a tower block and say: “Behind that window is a guy who could win Formula One. And behind that one there’s a winner of the ...”

“... sick with silly epigraphs: from Marilyn Monroe, Kafka, Lenny Bruce (who occupies an entire page), Billy Wilder, Madonna (or the ‘popular singer Madonna Ciccone’, as Smith has it, a tic that runs throughout the book), Walter Benjamin (or ‘the popular wise guy Walter Benjamin’). Each chapter has a cute digest at its head, announcing the delights on ...”

“... when I utter the word do I realise that rose is also the past tense of rise. That in calling your name I am also telling you to get up. I say it as if it is the only answer to your question – as if a name is also a sound we can be found in. Where am I? Where am I? You’re Rose, Ma. You have risen.This language is not ...”

“... arriving, acting on an impulse, I opened the telephone directory and looked for my father’s name. And, amazingly, there it was: his name, our old address, the unchanged telephone number, as if we had never gone away to the unmentionable country across the border. It was an eerie discovery. I felt as if I were being ...”