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“... municipal gardens which, being public, they suppose they own. Douglas Dunn has remarked about his Terry Street poems that he was emulating the know-all poet in Browning’s ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’:            not so much a spy As a recording chief inquisitor, The town’s true master, if the town but knew! Dunn added: ‘Except ...”

“... life. Early in her suggestive and elegantly written study of Noël Coward and Radclyffe Hall, Terry Castle admits that Hall’s ‘style is for the most part the antithesis of Coward’s – painfully discursive, polemical, almost entirely devoid of gaiety, archness or ambiguity’. Castle attempts to ‘Cowardise’ Hall, though allowing that ‘she may ...”

“... Oriental resignation, Father Rothschild SJ ...’). Her jokes have the flash-and-filigree of early Terry Southern, with his ‘What’s My Disease?’ quiz programme, before he went rather too far, in his tale of L.B.J.’s necrophily with the assassinated J.F.K. Still, whatever her disease, Miss Prager’s sick jokes can raise a laugh. Nothing funny about ...”

“... called Dunlop, who is probably a war criminal. This seems to me quite a good sick joke, worthy of Terry Southern. Forty years after his death, Hitler is still almost a taboo subject for jokes. We remember ‘Springtime for Hitler’. Survivors of the Titanic disaster don’t care for jests on the theme. But Don DeLillo, like so many American novelists, has a ...”

“... my suggestions, then it would surely be his own. By a sleight of hand he made [his character] Terry far better at maths than his creator. At one level it was obvious enough how these separate parts were tipped in and deployed. The mystery was how they were blended into something cohesive and plausible. The unstable pleasure of reading a passage like this ...”

“... emotional problems – were quite often traced back to the errant mother,’ writes Kathleen Jones in an essay on child guidance in the first half of the century. And ‘domineering wives’ created ‘spineless husbands who stayed away from their children to avoid confrontations’. There is certainly something of a history (Ladd-Taylor and Umansky’s ...”

“... of the kidnappers’ commando’. She appeals to many notables, meeting President Mitterrand, Terry Waite (then at liberty), an ‘influential Shi’ite extremist’ she knows, a terrorist imprisoned in a French jail: she ‘gushes over him’. European grandees arrive in Beirut to negotiate with the kidnappers and make a grander name for themselves. It ...”

“... texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 at the home stadium of the Chicago White Sox baseball team when thousands of disco records were set alight while the crowd chanted ‘Disco sucks, Disco sucks!’ The 1989 edition of the Penguin ...”

“... it’). Presumably what he found upsetting was the bleak final confrontation between Marlowe and Terry Lennox, the friend who has used him. ‘We were pretty good friends once,’ Lennox says. ‘Were we?’ Marlowe says. ‘I forget. That was two other fellows, seems to me.’ In I Refuse the reference makes it clear that Tommy must reclaim the two other ...”

“... two most substantial essays: Francis Huxley’s ‘Psychoanalysis and Anthropology’, Hugh Lloyd-Jones on ‘The Study of the Ancient World’. Doubtless Huxley will hate being called ‘substantial’: his style is busily flash. But he packs in more information, line by line, than any other contributor, and you finish his lecture with an enlarged sense of ...”

“... Place entertained a sparkling array of the period’s artists (Alma-Tadema, Whistler and Burne-Jones, with whom they were on especially intimate terms), writers (Barrie, Meredith, Hardy, Henry James), and theatrical people (Irving and Ellen Terry). Sargent painted Elizabeth, and Max Beerbohm drew no fewer than seven ...”

“... Stones. There is a certain amount of minor-key keening around the ‘mysterious’ death of Brian Jones, but that story circulates very much as a cautionary tale rather than an airy fable, all too humanly squalid, with nothing mythic or fantastical about it. (Even a lowlife encyclopedist like myself emerges from any time spent reading about ...”

“... trousers ... Tuf boots’. Acting as MC for the occasion, Inglis introduces us to the mourners – Terry Eagleton, ‘small, solid, mischievous’; Charles Swann, ‘wheezing with his awful respiration’; Patrick Parrinder, ‘silent, smiling, ironic’, the best-dressed of the party; Tariq Ali with ‘lustrous brown eyes’ but (Inglis claims) ‘a bit out ...”

“... used several times, a magnificent woman’s face, carved and painted by the outsider artist S.L. Jones: The Museum of Everything But I would be loath to put an image forward as one of ‘mine’ in which the head was the main element and went unchanged. And yet when I feel I have disguised the head enough – made it so only I could possibly pick out ...”

“... two zones with two decidedly different regimes of military occupation. In Fire on the Mountain Terry Bissell posits a world in which a successful John Brown’s raid sets off a black revolution in the American South which leads to the formation of a socialist state, ultra-modern and prosperous, in contrast with the shabby private-enterprise North that ...”