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“... Spark, A Far Cry from KensingtonOn​ the opening page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are loud, foul-mouthed, almost purposefully unprofessional.After ...”

“... it speak for itself to a wider world. For a find like the marvellous senior librarian Keith Harrison; we can only be grateful. Keith, it transpires, is a leading light in an outfit called Librarians for Social Change. ‘It’s books that I’m into,’ says Keith. Keith is so deeply into books that he would like to see all racist, sexist and élitist ...”

“... Beatles’ most fertile period was when they were under the dual (and somewhat divided) control of Brian Epstein and George Martin, both of whom had set out to manufacture a marketable product rather than inspire great musical achievements. A recent biography of Epstein emphasised the four musicians’ profound relief when at last they allowed themselves to ...”

“... in the world. His head must be dizzy with the minor works of Julian Mitchell and Francis King and Brian Patten and Maureen Duffy. His sleep must have been poisoned for years by worries about properly dating Piers Paul Read’s A Married Man. It is, in fact, a disaster to fill a book like this with storms of names and endless lists; narrative gets shouted down ...”

“... the jungle merge with the yet more dangerous chimera of the imagination. Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett – he is always styled ‘Colonel’: a piece of discreet self-promotion – was born in Torquay in 1867. His father was a blue-blooded spendthrift and crony of the Prince of Wales, who died young of alcohol and consumption when Fawcett was ...”

“... view, passing over the claims of music and theatre men like Humphrey Burton, John Drummond and Brian McMaster, and instead gambling that Isaacs would find a proper place for Covent Garden in a televisual age. Isaacs knew that the House was adrift. He looked forward to bringing a sense of purpose and adventure to the programming, as I did when I agreed to ...”

“... already performs works by key experimental composers such as Henry Cowell, Johanna Beyer and Lou Harrison. In addition to the usual orchestral percussion instruments, Cage tells Thomson, ‘we can improvise instruments from junkyards or construct things, given specifications.’ Stravinsky and Bartók’s orchestral music had already given percussion players ...”

“... of Hugh Gaitskell; lists were drawn up of such notorious Communists or Communist sympathisers as Brian Walden, David Owen, Robert Mellish, John Stonehouse, Roy Hattersley and Reg Prentice; and even a bogus pamphlet on ‘revolutionary strategy’ for the installation of socialism in Britain was contrived for off-the-record briefing of American ...”

“... Sir Francis Chichester, visits by Samuel Pepys, location work for the latest Jane Austen or for Harrison Ford (more bombs) in Patriot Games – are trumpeted, while the dark history of the Greenwich marshes, a decayed industrial wilderness, is brutally elided. The tongue of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of the Royal Naval College (film ...”

“... schools as, for instance, Leeds Grammar School did. Another absentee from the programme is Tony Harrison, an old boy of Leeds Grammar School, the snobbery of which is pilloried in some of his poems. By rights all such schools should be free schools, as indeed in the light of their origins, should many public schools. The nearest public school to us in ...”

“... resemble an etching, which is true enough, though it resembles something else even more, as Colin Harrison says in his excellent handbook to Palmer: a carved ivory. The Valley Thick with Corn is one of the most beautiful expressions of what Palmer’s son once astutely noted in his father, ‘a certain sentiment of surpassing fruitfulness’, and its ...”

“... Jocelyn has known or worked with. There is music that has been specially composed, a poem by Tony Harrison, the theme of which is all the toasts he and Jocelyn have drunk together in all the various places where they have worked around the world. They’re due to set off on Monday on another epic journey, the script, based on the Prometheus legend, is about a ...”