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“... irresponsible dare, his arm curling around the guitarist Mick Ronson. ‘But he thinks he’d blow our minds!’ And he did. One reason for that blown fuse was that Bowie had already worked out that the best way to put across a serious point was to stage it as an almost luridly OTT showbiz scene. You have to remember that Top of The Pops was it. There was ...”

“... scale. Everyone thinks that political issues could lead to an explosion but crime could as easily blow us asunder.’ Sterling quotes him as saying a month later: ‘Organised crime is destroying the economy, interfering in politics, undermining public morale, threatening individual citizens and the entire Russian nation ... our country is already considered ...”

“... many times over, in the town where I grew up. Those engines were new in the 1970s. Unlike Simon Bradley I lack the trainspotter’s enthusiasm for locomotives, and I’ve had some horrible journeys on that train. But the theatrical grandeur of its arrival always alters my sense of my surroundings, as if a door had opened, offering a glimpse of an ...”

“... can be ‘surprisingly like any other laboratory’: The smell makes me start back as if from the blow of a whip: the weak aromatic smell of organic chemistry laboratories. For a moment the large semi-dark room at the university, my fourth year, the mild air of May in Italy comes back to me with brutal violence and immediately vanishes. At another point Levi ...”

“... would have come from.’ ‘It wasn’t only about music, and music wasn’t only about music,’ Simon Reynolds, in his foreword to the k-punk book, remembers Fisher saying about the 1980s music press.A lot of it was about music, however, and on music as on art and culture in general, Fisher’s standards were strict. ‘Music that acknowledged and ...”

“... an armed demonstration at one of my revenue stations outside Hong Kong. We could perfectly easily blow up anything in the way of armed force the Cantonese could possibly send along, including their navy, which is very much less imposing than my own anti-smuggling flotilla. But instead of that I telegraph the Central Govt that I have been compelled to yield to ...”

“... to lobby correspondents as Routledge’s publication date grew closer. ‘It’s going to blow him away.’ In 1996, when he was living on £46,000 a year, Mandelson borrowed £373,000 (eight times his MP’s salary) from Geoffrey Robinson, an industrialist Blair put in the Treasury after New Labour’s victory. Robinson’s fortune had been inflated ...”

“... Which is not to say that the current England team is not a diverse one. It contains a Welshman (Simon Jones), an Australian (Geraint Jones), a South African (Kevin Pietersen), even a genuine public schoolboy (Andrew Strauss), all coached by a white Zimbabwean (Duncan Fletcher), many having previously been schooled by an Australian (Rodney Marsh). No wonder ...”

“... surprisingly elaborate constructions are erected, whether shaped by the genial indulgence of what Simon Russell-Beale called Greenblatt’s ‘love letter’ to Shakespeare, or by the hard-nosed iconoclasm of Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Ungentle Shakespeare (2001), whose determination ‘to bring Shakespeare down from the lofty isolation to which he has ...”

“... seats. The Labour attack on the Conservative Government’s Suez adventure in 1956 was a further blow to Jewish hopes, and the 17 Jewish Labour MPs voted against the Government in condemnation of Israel. Some would pay for their party loyalty with their seats, a clear indication of the existence of a Jewish vote. In February 1974 the Zionist Federation ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... background to that book he undertook to read the left-wing literature – Fourier, Proudhon, Saint-Simon – that had helped to shape the ideas of the insurrectionists of 1848, and hence of some of his characters, for whom the great political events of that year in Paris come as a catalyst, separating the active members of a generation from the passive. This ...”

“... from Paris, brilliant and sometimes wildly eccentric gospels for future human communities. Saint-Simon, Fourier and Cabet inspired models of collective harmony. The emaciated revolutionary veteran Filippo Buonarotti founded clandestine conspiracy networks devoted to the proto-communist vision of ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf, guillotined in 1797. One of ...”

“... They may lapse or perish through fatigue and inanition. A new weapon or a single sharp blow is not so common. By its amplitude, by the inherent problems and their repercussions, the Historia Augusta stands without a rival in any age. These imperial biographies are the sole Latin source of any compass for the years 117-284AD, from the death of ...”

“... that the government backed a third runway for Heathrow. Adonis persuaded him that to soften the blow for the environmental lobby he should at the same time announce the creation of a government company, High Speed Two Ltd, to consider the options for a new high-speed rail network. It was to report quickly with a ‘costed and deliverable proposal for a new ...”