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“... clarity that comes with having made sense of something at last. It is such a sad thing to read. Jon Savage offers an equally clear distillation of what has become a clash of narratives as books about Joy Division, Manchester and post-punk proliferate. The word fans settled on to describe the band’s sound was ‘industrial’, not least because they ...”

“... and educate the chaotic punk threat until it sits up nice and neat as a Cultural Studies textbook. Jon Savage’s monumental tome, 15 years in the writing and in which the author’s parents and grandmother get thanked for ‘living through this with me – twice’, attempts to do all these things at once. Unsurprisingly, England’s dreaming is at its ...”

“... of pop music, the inexplicable power of the right sound in the right place at the right time. Jon Savage and Hanif Kureishi have gathered more than a hundred and fifty pieces extracted from punk fanzines, key texts of pop history (such as Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music and Ice T’s autobiography) and the weekly music press, as well as from ...”

“... photomontage; scraps of layout from The Secret Public, the magazine she made with the writer Jon Savage; photographs of Howard Devoto, the frontman of Magazine, wearing fetish masks made from lingerie; a page from the Ludus accounts for spring 1979 (‘Excess expenditure over income: £102.84’). Nearby, the Haçienda footage played on a big ...”

“... of the main ways Britons have chewed over their postwar history. In 1988, the cultural historian Jon Savage, who had spent the 1970s as a young rock journalist writing doomy but excited pieces about punk and urban decay, published a cover feature about the decade for the style magazine the Face. It was headlined ‘The Decade that Taste Forgot’. The ...”

“... to pause and magnify. He cites all the other clever British pop authorities – Michael Bracewell, Jon Savage, Simon Reynolds – while replicating their tendency to jump frustratingly between subjects and stiffen up their sentences with jargon. Haslam’s footnotes, interestingly, are much more relaxed and informative. Here he can just be an ...”

“... and refine. ‘Joy Division’s themes are a perfect reflection of Manchester’s dark places,’ Jon Savage wrote in Melody Maker in July 1979, and in the NME Paul Morley championed the band’s ‘blurred depictions of desperation and desolation’. Cummins, who often worked alongside Morley, writes in his introduction to Juvenes, a collection of his ...”

“... is a necessary stage in the development of socialism. On the other hand, there was agreement that savage exploitation was unacceptable. In theory, there was no limit to how rich entrepreneurs would be allowed to get, but there were definite limits to how poor workers could be allowed to be. A major problem, therefore, was how to allow the side-effects of ...”

“... Easy Way), a canny primer by Bill Drummond and fellow KLF superhero Jimmy Cauty, the rock scholar Jon Savage asserts that ‘the biggest contradiction in late-period pop may well lie between calculation and intuition, between knowledge and the deepest innocence.’ Savage is interested to discover what happens when you ...”

“... stories illustrate their terminus ad quem? When sclerotic Communism dissolves, the result might be savage capitalism. In Delhi in 1988, I met Indian social scientists who expressed a feeling of inferiority with respect to China, based on the fact that the Chinese had managed to solve the problem of radical poverty in the countryside. Might future developments ...”

“... of the experiment, is never quite addressed. For help with these matters, we can turn, though, to Jon Lawrence’s Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Postwar England. The book is based on a careful rereading of the records of ten major community studies in postwar England (Lawrence doesn’t look at Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland). What a treasure ...”

“... One could write a long article on The Yawning Heights simply to let the reader sample the savage wit of such observations. But it is much better that the reader do this for himself. Instead I shall try to bring out the hidden structure of Zinoviev’s work. This I believe is to be found in certain logical distinctions that have been at the centre of ...”

“... more than they (or the censor) had reckoned on. It was a location ordeal, with Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight as the leads, and Boorman was at one point thoroughly beaten up by the indignant and much larger James Dickey, author of the original novel, who felt that the veracity of his story was being betrayed – only for it to be later revealed that Dickey’s ...”

“... Baghdad. His account of this terrifying experience is modest and precise. The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson first met Ala Bashir, an Edinburgh-educated plastic surgeon, one of Saddam’s few intimates and his official sculptor, in August 2000. As Bashir evolves from an apologist for Hitler and Saddam into a critic of Saddam’s cabinet, Anderson begins ...”

“... biggest kids’ agent in Hollywood. She represented Tommy Rettig, who was in River of No Return, Jon Provost, who played Timmy in Lassie, Karolyn Grimes, who played Jimmy Stewart’s daughter in It’s a Wonderful Life, and Eugene Mazzola, who was in The Ten Commandments. I assured Miss Moore I could do just as well as any of those creeps in any picture she ...”