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“... arrangement of letters etc, which suggest the syllables of which it is made up’. In 1987, Ian Rankin’s novel Knots & Crosses introduced us to a tough Edinburgh Detective Sergeant called John Rebus. A series of local girls had been kidnapped and strangled. Rebus – 41-year-old drinker, ex-soldier, failed husband, absentee father, Christian, annual ...”

“... and chips, Colin ordered fillet steak and chips, Bill ordered fillet steak, chips and peas and Jack, who went to the South of France for his holidays, ordered fillet steak with chips, peas and mushrooms on the side, a touch of sophistication that was not lost on the others.’ Like Dickens, Coe is a writer who is often praised for the breadth and depth of ...”

“... important. ‘No group is any better than its drummer,’ the Rolling Stones’ late piano player Ian Stewart tells A.E. Hotchner. ‘Drummers are the heart of a group,’ confirms Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience: ‘a good one is worth his weight in gold.’ And here is the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock on drummer Paul Cook: ‘that steady rhythm ...”

“... refusing to let health concerns stop him,’ Dallek writes, ‘became a pattern that would allow Jack to pursue a political career . . . Between May 1955 and October 1957, while he was launching his Vice-Presidential and Presidential bids, he was secretly hospitalised nine times.’ Here is Dallek’s depiction of Kennedy’s health at an early point in his ...”

“... ho hay ... Bottle of Bell’s ... Judgment Day ... Hence those smells ... Yo ho heg ... Bottle of Jack ... All gonna peg ... Came for the craic ... Yo ho hoem ... Bottle of Gordon’s ... Better read a funeral poem ... Not sodding Auden’s’), and a wonderfully improbable plot. It’s as if Terry Pratchett had written The Age of Anxiety. It’s not really ...”

“... of the George Smiley trilogy in 1979 and 1982 made him almost overnight a popular author on the Ian Fleming scale, and it can have done no harm that the TV version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy coincided with the Blunt scandal. Now, as a rite of academic canonisation, three critical monographs have been published which respectfully analyse his ...”

“... the early morning before the Report’s appearance we had the honour of a visit from the Reverend Ian Paisley, who stuck up a few ‘Ulster is British’ posters, adorned with the Union Jack, around the centre of Dublin. This was a fairly appropriate proleptic reaction to the Forum Report. All the publicity surrounding it ...”

“... delivered stage-monologues in verse: And can you ever remember a Tommy, A Swaddie, a Tiffy, or Jack, Hear a word said against Mother England, And not biff the foreigner back? And then there was the business of Dad Major’s name. Here there were vivacities galore. Dad’s real name was not Major; it was Ball. Christened Tom Ball, he took ‘Major’ as ...”

“... you to buy a decent pair of trousers? Mods posed a far less obvious threat. They flew the Union Jack, after all, and most of them had jobs; they were clean, well turned-out and had nice haircuts. In 1964 there was a brief spasm of tabloid outrage over some rather tame skirmishes between Mods and Rockers, mostly conducted in bracing seaside ozone. Talk of ...”

“... escapades of the Sixties as well as a few House and Garden glimpses of How He Lives Now. And the Jack Abbott fiasco is covered in some detail. The same cannot be said of Conversations with Capote. Here the indiscretions verge on mania, and it seems unlikely (though you never know) that even Capote would have allowed them to see print if he had lived. One ...”

“... He would much rather talk Proust over a posh dinner than sit at home and read a new novel by Jack Priestley. In many respects, and in spite of all the talk about becoming, or not becoming, a great artist, Connolly’s true vocation was to score points as a literary socialite. This being so, he had no wish to be praised for effortful near-misses. Far ...”

“... modes of entertainment: the slow-motion encounter, the rambling tales, never completed, by Mr Jack, the elderly drunk who is not too unlike Bithell in The Music of Time – above all, the marvellous funny and prolonged dinner-time conversations in the saloon of the cruise ship Alecto, in which everyone is trying to escape from someone else, and at the ...”

“... Ian Bell protests his disqualifications as a biographer rather too much: ‘I have approached Stevenson in the most unscholarly way. I am a journalist, and do not pretend to be anything else.’ But Bell, as he is at pains to point out, is a Scottish journalist and it is through the privilege of shared race and place of origin that he claims a blood-intimacy denied scholars ...”

“... The proximate cause of that game’s terribleness was the manager of the Republic of Ireland, Jack Charlton. When asked if Ireland’s next match, against Egypt, would be more entertaining, he gave a wholly characteristic response: ‘It might be. On the other hand it might bore the arse off you.’ (It did.) Charlton has perfected an impersonation of ...”

“... with Christine Keeler. But of all the lies that have been told in the House of Commons, Jack Profumo’s denial of any ‘impropriety’ with Miss Keeler was surely the most trivial. Yet it had massive repercussions and did considerable damage to Harold Macmillan. In July 1963, in a brilliant article in the Spectator (which I then owned), Anthony ...”