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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... This is October 1967. I can’t see how Flannery O’Connor (which he perhaps thought was a pen name) could be so easily dismissed by someone supposedly appreciative of language. The colours were too bright perhaps.7 March. Read and enjoy Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts about the lure of in-between places and the edges of cities and ...”

“... mowed To him as black a fate forebode. Melville knew Marvell’s work: in his Republican novella Billy Budd, he picks up the phrase ‘starry vere’ from ‘Upon Appleton House’. In these twinned republican imaginations, Leviathan, the state as whale, as monster of the deep, or the state as squad of bronzed soldiers, advances with a ...”

“... on even smaller screens. The emerging new comic style was called ‘stand-up’, a term whose very name suggested immobility.Low comedy may have been lost by then to popular American entertainment, but it had been found as high art by the international theatrical avant-garde. The model for Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty turned out to be the Marx ...”

“... East Finchley, London, to Jack Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison. Georgios (‘Yorg’ to the family but mispronounced as ‘Yog’ by Andrew Ridgeley, whose version stuck) was the youngest of three children, and the only boy. He was six months old when Lesley’s brother Colin ...”

“... Sybil, with titles like The Five of Me (1977), Tell me who I am before I die (1977), The Minds of Billy Milligan (1981). Perhaps the most recent instance is The Flock (1991). One way in which these stories differ from the old romantic tradition of doubles is that they are all doctrinaire. They present in novelesque form a current theory of what it is to be a ...”

“... heights, and finished him off, was Hollywood. In 1943 Paramount hired Chandler to work with Billy Wilder on the screenplay for James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. The film, directed by Wilder, was a critical and popular smash hit, garnering Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Spurred by this success, RKO produced the first Marlowe ...”

“... trumpet; Charlie Haden, a white bassist from a family of country singers in Shenandoah, Iowa; and Billy Higgins, a drummer from Los Angeles with a flawless sense of swing – to New York to perform at the Five Spot. These were ten weeks that shook the jazz world. The Five Spot engagement is usually remembered as marking the birth of free jazz, but the ...”

“... his being an extra-terrestrial agent sent down by a higher authority to save the world’. The name of the hero was to be Boreas Brown. Gray worked on this novel, off and on, for the next three decades, Boreas Brown turning into Obbly-Pobbly, Obbly-Pobbly into Gowan Cumbernauld. From Whitehill he went to Glasgow School of Art, then worked reluctantly as a ...”