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“... as well as enemies on his own side. Nairn’s Gramsci was a ‘man of the abyss’, a tightrope-walker between the universal and the particular, and between the extremes of his own ‘unevenly developed’ corner of Europe: Gramsci’s ‘personality, and the essence of his marathon fight with destiny, were made from the clash between Sardinia and ...”

“... legend of rave concerns the ‘Ibiza Four’: the DJs Danny Rampling, Paul Oakenfold, Johnny Walker and Nicky Holloway, who in 1987 went on holiday to Ibiza, took Ecstasy under the stars at the open-air club Amnesia, and watched DJ Alfredo play an unusually eclectic mix of pop, new wave, disco and US house as the sun came up. They came back to London and ...”

“... and warm hearts, not for pedantic historians. Gallacher was one of those who put it about that John Maclean was out of his mind, literally hallucinating, when he ran his Scottish Workers Republican Party in opposition to the infant CPGB. Nevertheless, the name of the great Marxist dominie was repeatedly invoked, and Pat Lally, Glasgow’s Labour ...”

“... scuttles away, rucksack on stooped shoulders, distancing himself from his earlier disguise as wall-walker, acrobat; a workaday man of the crowd. But even with the rucksack – wrong colour, wrong shape – the man stands out: too furtive, too fiercely concentrated, fleeing the scene rather than jogging or striding like the fortunate denizens of the ...”

“... was close to those of the sculptor William Wetmore Story, about whom he would write a book, and John Addington Symonds, on whom he would base his story ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’. During this first visit to Italy he was stepping lightly on places he and his characters would subsequently grow to know intimately, to suffer in, to haunt. He studied ...”

“... and dust in Sacramento would be like a plague or a curse – so that Joan’s new husband, John Gregory Dunne, when he came to visit, would use a mischievous finger to write ‘DUST’ here and there. Dunne, who died at the end of last year, was tall, handsome, articulate, funny – the man of the world behind whose attractive show Joan hid and ...”

“... in medieval hostel-cum-boutique hotel formerly occupied by those nutty-crusader Knights of St John. (A few grim-faced Saracens, too, no doubt – especially after Suleiman the Magnificent’s successful siege of Rhodes in 1522.) Cobbled streets around the fortress awash in the fanatic blood of centuries, but we’re in a holiday mood, sipping ...”

“... seen. Not a few of the characters the boom brought with it were larger than life too: ex-Governor John Connally of Texas, for example, still scarred from the Kennedy shooting, hustling for oil companies and on the way down to the bankruptcy that broke him, and T. Boone Pickens, the greenmail king, so thrilled with his acquisition of the Mesa field (which he ...”

“... fervour also seems to me to come into play in the contrast between his distaste for John Ford and his love of Howard Hawks, perhaps the perfect no-brow. The clue to Hawks’s greatness is that this sombre lining is cut against the cloth of the genre in which he is operating. Far from the meek purveyor of Hollywood forms, he always chose to turn ...”

“... and is probably the greatest novelty. In some respects it is a very odd compilation. Back in 1960 John Russell Brown wrote an article, celebrated in the trade, in which he argued against the value of old-spelling Shakespeare, saying among other things that the amount of ‘silent alteration’ an editor would have to introduce would make such a text almost ...”

“... out of the car, claiming that a tyre needs repair, and kills him with an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, smashing his head in and then cutting his throat. Accompanied by a young nephew, he decamps for Bangalore. Of course, Balram knows that his employer’s family will visit vengeance on his. But he doesn’t care. His brothers and their children ...”

“... back, cow-eyed and alabaster-browed. The actual text is 1079 tiny-printed pages long. ‘Who is John Galt?’ the novel begins: the question is rhetorical, an expression of despair. The setting is, loosely, America in the 1940s – Washington, Wisconsin, Mexico are mentioned, as are diners, bums, hamburgers, negligees – but film-set-thin and vague and ...”

“... seen Cabaret, listened to Kraftwerk, read Thames and Hudson paperbacks on the Bauhaus as well as John Willett and Ralph Mannheim’s punkish translations of Brecht, attended repertory screenings of Metropolis and M and put Louise Brooks posters on bedroom walls. Fassbinder’s real obsession was with the 1950s, and with West Germany’s US-bankrolled ...”

“... would seem’, ‘which is to say’, ‘to be sure’), to rank with Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, Willie Morris’s North toward Home, and other urban romances of the ardent outsider whose eyes are on the prize. Still, it’s handy to have it back in print after its long stay in limbo, for documentary purposes. It gives virgin readers an ...”

“... Martin Edwards ultimately made £93 million selling his Manchester United shares bit by bit. Sir John Hall and his family made £75 million when they did the same with their stake in Newcastle United. Arsenal’s shareholders, including descendants of upper-class gents who held the shares from the 1920s and had never taken a penny out, banked £300 million ...”