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“... 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 ...”

“... always has the dope that’s inside the inside dope. For instance, Breslin knows for certain that Jack Dempsey had lead in his gloves when he knocked out Jess Willard, he has the actual name of the guy who shot Arnold Rothstein, and he was pretty much in the room when Bugsy Siegel watched his screen test. All in all, the example of Damon Runyon must have ...”

“... the Surrealists and Paul Celan, and to the work of Americans such as Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Jack Spicer or Frank O’Hara and the New York poets. When I look back on it now, it’s clear that Quin’s writing sits more easily alongside this internationalist milieu. She was always critical of English narrowness and its ‘safe comfortable rituals, the ...”

“... MPs who, even before they had met her, thought a woman’s place was in the home. One Labour MP, Jack Jones, pleased her, however, by saying: ‘we have plenty of old women in the House, so I have no objection to having a young one.’ Rose does not record two other exchanges with the same man which pleased her less. In one of them, when she was denouncing ...”

“... at the ‘British disease’, they say, crippling the country with a surfeit of I’m-all-right-Jack individualism. Why should the Japanese take that particular road to Bethlehem? Are they not Number One, in any case? Is it not possible that they have found an alternative modernity, which avoids the oppressive stagnation of Communism as well as the jittery ...”

“... one kind of likes it.’ On the doomed expedition of 1925 Fawcett was accompanied only by his son Jack, and Jack’s best friend, Raleigh Rimell. Jack Fawcett was a handsome 21-year-old with a pencil moustache who had spent time in Hollywood and aspired to movie stardom (another Fawcett ...”

“... White Noise remembers the academic niche that the main character has carved out for himself. As Jack Gladney tells it, ‘when I suggested to the chancellor that we might build a whole department around Hitler’s life and work, he was quick to see the possibilities. It was an immediate and electrifying success.’ Others were equally impressed by the ...”

“... first-rate political and cultural journalism, and even this month, when the newish British lad mag Jack flags on its cover ‘A Speed Special Starring Fast Planes, Bikes and Women’, the much derided Playboy advertises a long piece by Gore Vidal on God and the state. Jack runs a piece about British wrestling in which even ...”

“... Books bought in Cambridge from the libraries of Raymond Williams, Dadie Rylands, Tony Tanner, Jack Lindsay and other luminaries. Even the most unassuming books prompted recollections. They composed a sort of biography, each one acting like a door in an advent calendar, opening on to some moment in the past.Still, they had to go. From a dozen shelves of ...”

“... One of the myths that fuzzes the shadowy outline of Ian Penman, a laureate of marginal places, folds in the map, is that Paul Schrader, the director of a sassy remake of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, admired Penman’s review so much that he invited him over to Los Angeles to talk product. Penman in California was truly the vision of a man who fell to earth, a pale alien in an X Files landscape ...”

“... too numerous and too mundane to mention: the Mister Kiplings, the Messrs Cadbury and McVitie, the Jack Daniels, the Sainsburys, the Guinnesses, the Marks and the Spencers, and of course dear old Mister Gordon and his fine distillery. These many named and unnamed of the acknowledgment pages are the foundations on which a book is built: they help to determine ...”

“... inspired leadership, such as that of the elder Pitt, of superior fighting skills, such as those of Jack Tar, and of tactical brilliance, such as that of Marlborough, Wellington and Nelson. This reluctance to institutionalise war also helps explain why so little has been written on the domestic impact of Britain’s involvement in international ...”

“... the Tory Party. A huge flow of paper about Hamilton and his paymaster/co-plaintiff, the lobbyist Ian Greer, emerged for the first time. The decisive revelation was a tape-recorded conversation between Hamilton and the First Secretary to the Treasury, Michael Heseltine, in which Hamilton denied any ‘financial relationship’ with ...”

“... Princess Diana, George Michael, Anthea Turner, Richard Branson, Paul McCartney, Patsy Kensit, Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t heard of, don’t worry, none of them matters as much as they think they do.) At a Christmas lunch at the ...”

“... with Sinatra was a serious three-line whip: beg off early, fall asleep, order a coffee instead of Jack Daniels, and you risked expulsion, exile, the Antarctica of his disaffection. He could not abide the ends of days: it was one thing he had no control over. So he made an enemy of the clock, of merely human time, each night’s feeble apocalypse: that dire ...”