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“... trunked and bikinied masses. ‘Britannia Roused, or the Coalition Monsters Destroyed’ by Thomas Rowlandson (1784). In the election of October 1974, Wilson got a bare majority, with 319 seats, but still lacked a clear mandate. Yet the country, it turned out, was less divided than it appeared. In 1975 there was a referendum on continuing membership ...”

“... to expend, some of it on art, particularly American Pop, that brand which, as the art historian Thomas Crow recently put it in Artforum, ‘looked like products being sold like products’. The network of commercial galleries expanded greatly at that time, as did the influence of dealers and collectors. That contemporary art might be seen in the first ...”

“... Its thesis often echoes Christopher Hill’s work on Puritanism and the more recent suggestions of Keith Wrightson, but Hunt finds a voice of his own. His concern is with ‘social puritanism’: with the ‘interpenetration’ of the ‘material and ideological causes’ of the Puritan Revolution. Puritanism, he maintains, was a response to the social and ...”

“... made Lydon sound like a drowning man one minute, a Smurf the next. ‘The idea,’ according to Keith Levene, PiL’s brittle-looking and sounding guitarist, ‘was to break through conditioning.’ The following year, they produced a second album, Metal Box. It came packaged as a circular film canister, stamped with the PiL logo and just wider than a ...”

“... the Rolling Stones had conceived as a homage to Redding and the Stax studio sound; Keith Richards later called the Stones’ version ‘a demo for Otis’). Slow, pleading ballads like ‘These Arms of Mine’, ‘Chained and Bound’, ‘My Lover’s Prayer’, ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’ and ‘Pain in My Heart’ may have been his ...”

“... Forward from Liberalism, crabwise; Sybil Thorndike joined the board of the Daily Worker; Dylan Thomas insisted that his ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’ must first appear as part of a socialist Mayday feature in 1944. Doris Lessing, so she now claims, grew hysterical; Clough, who briefly belonged to Jimmy Maxton’s Independent Labour Party, mostly ...”

“... remarkable man. His people were from Derbyshire, which his poet son certainly didn’t advertise. Thomas Lowe Bunting took a Gold Medal for his MD thesis. He was later elected to the Royal Society in Edinburgh for his work on the histology of the lymphatic glands of all sorts of creatures. Bunting recalled his father’s ‘tiny surgery with a desk about two ...”

“... World War poetry cannot do without reference back to that of the First; and it’s true that Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost ...”

“... it easier to believe if the reporter had been from the Yorkshire Evening Post – the newspaper Keith Waterhouse first worked on as a reporter. So while Red Riding seems like gritty realism it is in this respect quite romantic, as romantic and fanciful as the stories told at the other end of the social and geographical scale in Midsomer Murders. In Midsomer ...”

“... from the after-effects of a childhood cricket injury.Biographers of Grey, including the latest, Thomas Otte, have taken these three incidents in their stride, granting them a few incurious sentences at most. Instead they have dwelled on Grey’s love of homely nature: his passion for fly-fishing and bird-watching, his long weekends in Hampshire, his ...”

“... on British Sea Songs, including ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’; ‘Rule, Britannia!’ composed by Thomas Arne, with orchestration by Malcolm Sargent; and finally ‘Jerusalem’, set to music by Parry, and later reorchestrated by Elgar. All of these involve active participation by the audience which, as the second half advances, becomes ever more ...”

“... DJs have become entrepreneurs, pop producers, song writers and label managers. B.B. King, Rufus Thomas and Sly Stone were all radio DJs before they were recording artists, but it’s the story of the DJ as ‘producer-artist’ which concerns DJ Culture and Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. Both books tell how DJs went from playing records to influencing ...”

“... of umbrageousness and standoffishness. Wilson records delicious extracts from the diary of Julia Thomas, whose husband, James, was appointed judge at Rajahmundry in 1836. They were a well-meaning couple, who set up a school for Indian children. But James was incurably reclusive. He refused to engage with the locals and when they travelled through his patch ...”

“... The new ideology was fiercely resisted by the upholders of older pieties. In Utopia (1516), Sir Thomas More, though himself a considerable landowner, denounces the powerful magnates who ‘enclose all into pastures’ and demolish houses and entire villages to make sheep runs. ‘The rich men, not only by private fraud but also by common laws, do every day ...”

“... of Rimbaud, it may be purely a matter of image. (Which is itself already quite modern.) Before Keith Richards, before punk, here is rock and roll animal Arthur Rimbaud with his anti-gravity shock of lightning strike hair. A queer Pan with italicised attitude, Rimbaud gets the Leonardo DiCaprio film and David Wojnarowicz mask. All Baudelaire’s best-known ...”