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“... I heard a Portishead song being played in Spud-U-Like, and every weekend since 1988 motorway service stations on the M6 and M62 have been haunted by clubbers who spend the nights journeying between venues in Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool and the Midlands. Pop music has also stormed the citadel of literary fiction, and characters in novels such as Karline ...”

“... High’s Latinate period, which – though the school was an ancient foundation and claimed Robert Henryson, the ‘Scottish Chaucer’, among its early masters – occurred circa 1935. The headmaster, whom I encountered face to face only once, had MA Cantab after his name and wore a black cloak that, though every teacher had one, gave him an especially ...”

“... containing my will, birth certificate, marriage certificate, national insurance and health service numbers, share certificates relating to a small bankrupt publishing house (kept as a souvenir), an Equitable Life policy, a testimonial from F.R. Leavis dated 1946, and a letter from L.C. Knights regretting that he couldn’t act as a referee since my ...”

“... those who suffered during the Cold War. There were famous and well-rewarded co-optations in the service of British and American interests, such as the gathering of conservative thinkers at the University of Chicago, but there was also a commendable hospitality – for example, to the Frankfurt School, which found its way to America by way of a sojourn in ...”

“... in ‘this position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction’. He has a job at a service station, or as a janitor or a delivery man, with the prospect of many more years in this unwriterly posture, so unlike the situation of the well-known writers he admires. And after these destructive years of parenting there was an alcoholic hiatus, ten ...”

“... the presidency, there were several attempts to restore the family to the office. JFK’s brother Robert was assassinated after his victory in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were scuppered after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 – when a young female aide ...”

“... but as classy and educational, shown in the Masterpiece Theatre strand of the Public Broadcasting Service (as were those other great English classics Morse, Prime Suspect and Midsomer Murders). Upstairs, Downstairs, Cooke explains at the beginning, ‘follows the life of a London family through the reign of Edward VII. He was the big bearded monarch who had a ...”

“... and lying-stories and two-penny poets’ in his privy, and many texts were ‘pressed into general service’, as Margaret Spufford put it in Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981), as toilet paper. Books were pulled apart to serve in the binding and endpapers of later books, the pages of an unwanted Bible perhaps padding the spine of an unholy prose ...”

“... looked like laundry baskets but weren’t. The railway companies operated a discreet distribution service. Passengers travelling from Liverpool Street to Cambridge were unaware that a consignment of corpses was regularly hitched to their train. There were limits: in 1858 the master of a London workhouse was convicted of selling human remains for personal ...”

“... write any poems until the autumn of 1914. Thinking over their genesis afterwards, his friend Robert Frost commented that ‘the decision he made in going into the army helped him make the other decision in form.’ This is both a simple material explanation and perhaps also a piece of soul-searching. Frost knew that the more Thomas believed he could ...”

“... bands. One of the earliest was the Cyfarthfa band, in the iron-smelting centre of Merthyr Tydfil. Robert Crawshay, the owner of the Cyfarthfa works, in effect created a private orchestra. He employed a family of musicians from Bradford, members of London theatre orchestras and strolling players; and, like some Renaissance prince or 17th-century cardinal, gave ...”

“... that the area had been staked out). This complicated phone trail eventually led to a man called Robert Lady. Lady was the CIA’s man in Milan, formally a US vice-consul, but well known to the police as a spy. He was so in love with Italy that he had decided to spend his imminent retirement in a luxurious villa near Turin. When this house was raided by the ...”

“... estate mogul and reality television executioner. Trump has never shown fealty and at best paid lip service to the conservative movement’s three-prong catechism of which Ryan is the most prominent and doctrinaire national exemplar. In shorthand these are a ‘strong defence’ (Trump claims falsely to have opposed the Iraq War and would allow or encourage ...”

“... the candidates for the presidency who have won their honourable eminence by great and unflagging service.’ The following Christmas, Debs, the perennial Socialist Party candidate, was released with a commuted sentence on the orders of President Warren Harding.Debs won 3.4 per cent of the vote in that election, but Donald Trump is currently polling ahead of ...”

“... books of the Eighties have been American, and ‘excellence’ is their creed. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Junior’s In Search of Excellence1 appeared in 1982 and it quickly established itself as the best-selling management book ever. Here was an unambiguous riposte to the Japanese economic miracle, that Pearl Harbour of the Carter era. Excellence ...”