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“... No more than one or two artists in each medium – Pollock, Boulez, Messiaen, Beckett, Claude Simon – are exempt from the disapproval Butler visits on almost everyone else. It is only when he returns from individual works to the avant-garde as a movement that he becomes more forgiving. The shift in tone is so great that the book reads at times like a ...”

“... was always a him). It is appropriate that their inner world is most convincingly drawn in a novel, Simon Leys’s delicately ambivalent The Death of Napoleon. The most penetrating mad testimony falls outside Murat’s remit, since its subject ended up in a British rather than a French asylum. James Tilly Matthews – my book ...”

“... just a matter of investment, technology and productivity. They were also, in the words of Simon Kuznets, about ‘the future prospect of underdeveloped countries within the orbit of the free world’.Walt Rostow, who was, along with Kuznets, one of the field’s most influential early thinkers, understood growth as the foundation of the postwar world ...”

“... the actress who originally played Miss Marple’, is present. Also namechecked are Patricia Hodge, Simon Russell Beale, Giles Gordon (once Moorcock’s literary agent), Andrea Dworkin and Iris Murdoch, who ‘sat smiling into the middle-distance while Felix Martin explained the H-bomb to her’. What Moorcock is doing, under the permission of a work of ...”

“... so close to the leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned rock idol (the ‘love child of Bob Dylan and James Brown’, as Jon Stewart joked) that we could almost have fist-bumped. To get this close, we journos had to bring specific photo ID (‘driver’s licence or passport’), be searched, undertake to make notes only with pen and notepad, refrain from ...”

“... the ‘fair oak’ situated at the back of the playing space – while the magician-astrologer Simon Forman claimed to have seen Macbeth and Banquo ‘riding through a wood’, rather than a ‘blasted heath’, before meeting ‘three women fairies’ at the beginning of Macbeth. There is nothing in Shakespeare’s text to indicate any such spectacle; and ...”

“... plan and the extraordinary Calcutta Journal, edited in those years by the radical English wanderer James Silk Buckingham and his friend Rammohan Roy, a high-caste Bengali intellectual who campaigned to reform Hinduism and attacked the ruling East India Company. Both men believed in the reforming power of written constitutions for India and republished the Plan ...”

“... the last to be born are, soberingly, Stephen Adrian Lawrence (1974-93, ‘murder victim’) and James Patrick Bulger (1990-93, ‘murder victim’). And so ends the 20th century. Turning from subjects to contributors, the roll-call is undeniably impressive; surely no other project could come near to matching the success of the ODNB in commanding the labour ...”

“... say “A friend of mine just died” doesn’t mean anything any more,’ the historian Simon Watney said in 1994, but that network is qualitatively and quantitively specific to how gay men live. Deaths in those networks mean deaths of whole areas of memory and association. Death for most heterosexuals means family deaths most of the time, up to the ...”

“... a verdict of unlawful killing, which made possible the criminal prosecution for manslaughter of PC Simon Harwood. (He was acquitted.) The finding of death by misadventure in Peach’s case made any prosecution impossible, despite there being a strong argument for a second inquest. The High Court can order one, as it did recently on the Hillsborough ...”

“... of the countryside); it had now become hard to tell the difference between them and devils. King James in his Demonology (1597) is indignant at the idea of devils who live in the storm-clouds: probably he felt that this practically lets you get back to believing in the pagan demigods. The familiar of Faust in the original German has never been to Hell at ...”

“... of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July ...”

“... ethos and scene. Technically speaking, the panoramic method of War and Peace, which made Henry James refer to it as a ‘loose baggy monster’, is far more cunningly ordered than it looks. No one is dropped or forgotten; scene dovetails neatly into scene; above all, the central event – the attempted seduction of Natasha by Anatoly Kuragin – works by ...”

“... well known. Dylan is among the (male) English (language) poets here: the translators of the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Donne, Marlowe, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Hardy, Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, Larkin, Berryman, Stevens, Frost – all figure prominently. Much of what Ricks has to say on this ...”

“... Last summer, the National Theatre put on Timon of Athens as a play about the credit crunch. Simon Russell Beale was the glossy, well-fed protagonist, a wealthy patron of the arts and liberal dispenser of gifts, who plunges into misanthropy when he can borrow no more and his friends reject him. The production was stylishly contemporary, set in the expensive interiors of Mayfair and Canary Wharf ...”