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“... it was not televised. (For those keeping track of our dynastic democracy, Richard was father to William, the Gore campaign head, and to Richard II, the current Chicago Mayor.) One pants-down scene was captured live on election night when George W. received a call from brother Jeb, Governor of Florida, soon after CNN had projected Florida for Gore. The ...”

“... If a certain stoicism was required to get through William Burroughs’s disgusting novel, Naked Lunch, there are fewer problems with his mail. Indeed, the only danger is over-indulgence, for this stuff slides easily off the end of the fork. The letters here were written between 1945 and 1959. They begin with Burroughs at his family home in St Louis, from which he moves smartly through a series of addresses in the US ...”

“... so not expecting anyone else to either. The great loves of his life map out his career: Richard Harris (This Sporting Life), Albert Finney (Billy Liar), Malcolm McDowell (If ...) and Frank Grimes. None of them seems to have come across (if that, indeed, was what he wanted). They were all incorrigibly male and not all were over-blessed with ...”

“... is involved. In the 12th century, as Emma Jones writes in her patchy history of London’s water, William Fitzstephen wrote of ‘special wels in the Suburbs’ where the water was ‘sweete, wholesome and cleare’. Water no longer has to be sweet by law, but it does have to be ‘wholesome’, a word that appears in drinking water standards in both the UK ...”

“... to his hands on the keyboard and the all-important screen which displays ‘Shakespeare, William: Hamlet’ and promises 141 Entries – a VDU cornucopia. Peter James is tieless and youthful. In the background, other screens glow dimly. The second plate portrays ‘Library Chief Executive Brian Lang in the entrance hall of the new building at St ...”

“... you are for the Ins or for the Outs, there is or should be no third choice. My former pupil, William Rogers, has just pronounced on The Politics of Change.* I sought guidance from him and found little except that the two established parties have made a fine mess of things, which I knew already. I am curious about the alliance between the Social Democrats ...”

“... elaborate cross-cutting between the two romances. Will Trudy, Tubbs’s friend, played by Naomie Harris, survive the bomb blast that threw her into a coma? How do we feel about Crockett’s having fallen in love with Isabella, even though she is Jesus’s mistress, the smartest person in the movie and obviously the mind behind most of the crime going ...”

“... Allen Ginsberg’s star now shines more brightly than the rest. True, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs glowed on in the aftermath of On the Road (1957) and Naked Lunch (1959); Brion Gysin, inventor of the cut-up technique, is still visible on a clear night. But the beautiful Lucien Carr, an Alain Delon lookalike drawn into the Beat circle by a ...”

“... of refined barbarians. The pantheon contains John Vanbrugh, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, S.S. Teulon, William Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of Italian Fascism Douglas Stephen, architect of a ...”

“... as coast harpies and land monsters, salvagers were beneath contempt. The 17th-century preacher William Johnson inveighed against ‘the Countrey people enriching themselves with the losses of other men, the worst way of getting in the world’.It suited a lot of people to blame anonymous mobs of wreckers: merchants trying to claim compensation for their ...”

“... staff members as well – notably the columnist Conor Cruise O’Brien, the financial writer William Keegan, and, in all probability, the political editor Adam Raphael. If he hasn’t sacked them yet, it may only be because he finds himself strapped in by the conditions attached to the sale of the paper. But Rowland is a very determined character – as ...”

“... The only inaugural address with claims to have decisively shaped what followed came in 1841 when William Henry Harrison – ‘Old Tippecanoe’ – was so keen to show he was capable of observing the proprieties that he delivered a two-hour disquisition on constitutional government without a coat or hat in the cold and wet Washington winter. He caught a ...”

“... has been blamed on the bloc of isolationist senators led by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and William E. Borah of Idaho. But these Irreconcilables, as they were called, formed only a minority in the Senate, even one narrowly controlled by the Republicans. The final vote was 49 for the treaty as amended and 35 against. So Wilson could have had the ...”

“... at Marham was made a permanent military unit. Lord Tedder’s RAF Deputy Chief of Staff, Sir William Dickson, proposed that the US bases remain designated as Royal Air Force stations: a cosmetic disguise intended to alleviate local hostility to the presence of foreign military forces on British soil in peacetime. The proposal was accepted, and on this ...”

“... Brigid Brophy, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Angela Carter, Eva Figes, Giles Gordon, Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, even hasty, muddled Robert Nye, Ann Quin, Penelope Shuttle, Alan Sillitoe (for his last book only. Raw Material indeed), Stefan Themerson, and (coming) John Wheway (stand by): and if only Heathcote Williams would write a novel’. In ...”