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“... his attacks, unscathed, protected by their own sense of themselves. It is a relief to turn to John Lahr’s Automatic Vaudeville, 15 reprinted essays written over the last decade, which go far to confirm his rating as the Leavis of the popular, largely performing arts, though this collection also includes a snatch of reportage on Dallas – at once living ...”

“... can to shut them all down.The present crisis began to show in Asia towards the end of last year. John Kemp, a Reuters energy analyst, describes the emergency there as a shock similar to Britain’s terrible winter of 1947 or the oil crisis of 1973: a sudden event that exposed deeper structural problems. Pakistan warned of a major gas shortfall last October ...”

“... on each of these days 20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are entirely dependent on it. On 18 December UNRWA suspended all food distribution for both emergency and regular programmes because of the blockade. The WFP has had similar ...”

“... Sex Pistols as Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious, eclipsing the group’s musical muscle: drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock. (It was Matlock who wrote nearly all the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial ...”

“... were the ship’s captain, David Cheap; his second-in-command, Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling ...”

“... figures. Successively onto the scene came such butch illuminati as Miller, Michael Frayn and Peter Cook, with results that Mr Hewison obviously finds it much less uncomfortable to write about, even if it simultaneously becomes more difficult to trace the thread. These were and are real individuals, less easily subsumed into a trend, either at the time or in ...”

“... for Aston, Birmingham issued the following leaflet: £5 Reward! DESPERATE TORIES WILD LIE. Mr John Strachey writes: ‘It has come to my notice that Tory canvassers are making the outrageous statement that I am a foreigner. This is a most serious allegation which the Aston Tory Party, utterly beaten in political argument, has fallen back upon as a last ...”

“... as he is about the costs of the Falklands, or the welfare of the Polish Government. Like Mr Foot, John Rentoul of the New Statesman has contributed some crucial articles – turning-points in the affair. David Leigh of the Observer wrote on 6 January 1985, ‘The intercepted Argentine signals were decoded and telexed at the time directly to Navy HQ at ...”

“... hack’s best hope of getting into newsprint. There was, for example, fulsome coverage for Robin Cook (Derek Raymond) once he had gone; local colour pieces (memory tapes from the Coach and Horses) outweighing the tepid inches of a life-time’s review space. Cook, that most civilised of men, most troubled of writers, was ...”

“... cited as precedent the game of Consequences, which the Surrealists used to play. In 1997, John Updike began a composite fiction on the Internet, and Amazon.com bankrolled a contest to continue it, with daily winners awarded a thousand dollars and a Grand Prize of $100,000 at the end for one of the contestants chosen by lottery. Harper’s Bazar does ...”

“... Keneally seems to favour) suggests that the British Government had been persuaded by Captain Cook to believe that Australia would be a rich source of flax production and mast timber, which could replace possibly hostile European suppliers. This commercial optimism proved unfounded. Flax would not grow and the Australian pines were too knotty. But the ...”

“... First, let me declare a disinterest. John Lanchester and I are both involved, in different ways, with the London Review of Books, but otherwise have nothing to do with one another. Now that’s out of the way, onto the novels. Lanchester’s first, The Debt to Pleasure (1996), begins: ‘This is not a conventional cookbook’ – a more interesting way of saying that it is an unconventional novel ...”

“... Lisle gave Anne Boleyn a monkey in 1534, she wasn’t pleased. ‘As to touching your monkey,’ John Hussee wrote to Lisle the following year, ‘of a truth, madam, the queen loveth no such beasts nor can scarce abide the sight of them.’ What happened to the monkey isn’t clear. One hopes Anne didn’t do to it what Samuel Pepys did to his pet monkey in ...”

“... has withered and the sunshine faded. The death toll recorded by Roy Strong, Marcus Binney and John Harris in The Destruction of the English County House tops nine hundred, and few writers set contemporary novels in country houses as they did only a generation ago. One gratifying consequence is that it has finally become possible to view country houses ...”

“... sense:The night we separated, my husband had a party in our house to which the Beatles, John Lennon, Stuart Sutcliffe – the one who died – and I can’t remember who else, came. The party went on for three days and nights; I moved out down the road to a friend’s house with the children, and later we divorced amicably. I never saw the Beatles ...”