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“... the poor but beautiful young Annie’s hand in marriage. Although she already has a sweetheart, Jack, she allows herself to be persuaded by her social-climbing mother to marry. To preserve propriety, Doctor Strong’s friend, Wickfield, has Jack removed to army service in India. Annie wilts: she’s sacrificed her natural ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jack-fruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun. There’s heat but no dust in this opening paragraph, and though it’s an odd word to use, what’s ...”

“... and the Treaty of 1707, Scottish Imperial ambitions had perforce to operate under the Union Jack and not the Saltire, yet in some parts of the world one would scarcely have known it. By the 1760s, Scots controlled huge swathes of what was supposedly the English East India Company’s patronage. The first Scottish Prime Minister, Lord Bute, allowed his ...”

“... all the important US novelists writing at the turn of the century can be contained within it: Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin. McElrath and Crisler, however, claim that the naturalist novel has been slighted by scholars in favour of the realist. This was true when they began writing their ...”

“... clients he tended to become aggressive and uncooperative. The users of the buildings paid the price. From the moment the spotlight fell on him, Stirling adopted an unchanging style of dress – blue or green shirt, baggy sweater, purple socks, acid green briefcase – revved up his buccaneering manner and collected a circle of acolytes. Beware the student ...”

“... extra-judicial killing of animals, in particular, was frowned on. In 1576, a Franconian hangman, Jack Ketch, decided to take the law into his own hands and publicly hang a sow that was awaiting trial for an (alleged) attack on a carpenter’s child. Ketch’s actions were denounced by the authorities, and he fled the area in disgrace (it’s more likely to ...”

“... that might possibly be designated as someone else’s duty: the postwar world of I’m All Right Jack was already clear in embryo. The collision between these very different subcultures was brutal. The Canadians quickly discovered that 187 of their colleagues, taken prisoner, had been executed by the Hitler Jugend division – 30 mutilated Canadian bodies ...”

“... essays on the Post-Modern, some of which have appeared in earlier books by Jameson, and it pays a price for thematic unity by omitting some of the best things he has written in recent years, among them his appreciations of the architectural writings of Manfredo Tafuri and the novels of Philip K. Dick. Still, these essays show him to be, unlike Lyotard, only a ...”

“... Higher Education and Literary Supplements; we know about HarperCollins, and hence about Jack Higgins, and about Fourth Estate, and hence about The Corrections; we know about the BSkyB network in Britain, about its role in pioneering multi-channel TV, and about its ownership of the rights to transmit Premier League football, which have just been ...”

“... It has been suggested that the ripper might be projecting onto horses the impulses that drove Jack the Ripper (or the Yorkshire Ripper) to rape women. But horses aren’t women – or are they? In the Indo-European world, the horse is a symbol of lawless animal passion. City children usually catch their first glimpse of the mating game when they see dogs ...”

“... couldn’t be the reason for the person’s fame – which eliminated such likely winners as Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy. Nor could murder be seen as part of the famous person’s regular activities, his professional equipment, as it were. This let out people like Genghis Khan and Hitler – who were, in any case, only ‘arrested’ in the sense of ...”

“... more elusive epitaph. As his grave at Westminster Abbey was being covered, a passer-by, Sir Jack Young, noticed that the headstone was still blank. He ‘gave the fellow eighteeen pence’ to cut an inscription. It read simply: ‘O Rare Benn Jonson’. Like the portraitist, Jonson’s biographer has to achieve a kind of dual image. He has to convey ...”

“... to have been an overwhelming passion, discovered in himself at the age of eight, when he broke the price code his father pencilled inside the covers of the books sold in his famous secondhand bookstore at 84 Charing Cross Road. A dozen years later, as if by pre-established harmony, the cryptographic needs of SOE gave him a perfect opportunity to exercise his ...”

“... Bethnal Green via Spitalfields to Whitechapel, famous in its day for such do-badding criminals as Jack the Ripper, and for such do-gooding enterprises as Toynbee Hall. More precisely, White’s volume recovers the fabric of Jewish life among those immigrants who lived in one East End tenement block, while Samuel’s puts between hard covers the ordered ...”