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“... the awkwardly constructed and uninvitingly written ‘literary biography’ of Brown by Rowena and Brian Murray, published in 2004, this new account is clear and stylish. Fergusson’s most arresting new material concerns his dealings with women, about which she is remarkably non-judgmental. At times, however, she seems reluctant to sift the ...”

“... Twentieth-century Huxleys have received less biography than one might have expected. Nicholas Murray usefully fills a gap between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws ...”

“... consistent upon almost nothing else, have been united in a sustained denunciation of rhetoric. Brian Vickers’s In Defence of Rhetoric is an attempt, copious, complex, armed at all points with telling examples, to meet and turn back this onslaught, which seems so confidently sure of its own rightness. If we define rhetoric as the art of ...”

“... On the night of 30 January 1972, Murray Sayle was sent by the Sunday Times to Londonderry to report on the fatal shooting of 14 unarmed civil rights marchers by British Army Paratroopers. The article he wrote diverged from the official line; it was never printed. Twenty-six years later, his lost copy was unearthed by the new Inquiry ...”

“... on matters of drink and loose-living. His childhood, as he recalls in writings edited by his son Brian in Exploration Fawcett (1953), was ‘devoid of parental affection’ but full of ‘grand times’ with his brother and sisters. At the age of 19 he was a commissioned officer in the Royal Artillery, handsome in a lanky, buttoned-up sort of way, and was ...”

“... of the lease was first raised with China by the most far-sighted of Hong Kong’s governors, Sir Murray (now Lord) Maclehose, during the first visit ever by a governor to Beijing in March 1979. The tall, dignified Scot had seen a vision of the Hong Kong that was to be; under his aegis, the first harbour tunnel and subway line were begun, and the new ...”

“... led to the identification of three of the four perpetrators of the original bombings: Michael Murray, who died in 1999; James Francis Gavin, who died in 2002; and Michael Christopher Hayes (to whom I owe no duty of confidentiality since he made no admissions to me), who is alive and well and living in Dublin. None of these names would be known if it ...”

“... mother’s body and to get the IRA to admit the truth about what it did has kept her alive. Jean Murray was born in 1935, the first of five children. The family lived in a tiny two-up two-down house owned by the Corporation in the heart of Protestant East Belfast. From the front door you can see the yellow cranes of the Harland and Wolff shipyard where ...”

“... of the rhythm section Bowie would work with for the next five years – Alomar on guitar, George Murray on bass, Dennis Davis on drums – and the new emphasis on production over composition in the song-making process. Bowie’s new onstage persona, the Thin White Duke, a vampiric cross between Aleister Crowley and Prospero with fascist overtones, having ...”

“... a graphic illustration of the problem with much of the prose in this volume). In any case, after Brian Dobbs’s Edwardians at Play, one of the few works to combine an interest in the sociology of sport with a lively appreciation of the sports themselves, it seems almost certain that Bob Deans scored an equalising New Zealand try, though the referee decided ...”

“... out smoke. The chains in the swing park were all twisted up. Rattray’s Cycles was open in Murray Street and the Rottenrow Maternity Hospital did tea for visitors at 10 a.m. Rag and bone men appeared with balloons for ‘any old rags’. Girls stoated about in their mother’s high heels, kids with squints or harelips, cowlicks or NHS specs. The boys ...”

“... single source has enjoyed so much esteem: the writings of the respected contemporary historian, Brian Manning, are heavily derivative on Baxter for an explanation of how a constitutional struggle (1640-3) broadened into a religious struggle (1643-9). But such reliance is dangerous. For one thing, as we have seen, it is an account written after the ...”

“... Bute was decried as the new Highland adventurer. It did not help that another Scot, William Murray, Lord Mansfield, who was dogged by the smear that he was intent on importing Scots Romanist principles into the English common law, had become lord chief justice in 1756. Might Bute and his Scotch cronies find no better use for Magna Carta, English ...”

“... glorifying the work of the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and ...”

“... any Dublin 4 liberal.In fact, it’s a tangled web. I remember talking to Deane about the plot of Brian Moore’s Lies of Silence (1990). At one point in this thriller, a priest tries to persuade a hotel manager to say that he can’t identify a young IRA volunteer (a nephew of the priest’s) who was responsible for a kidnapping and car bombing. ‘It ...”