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“... the greatest) but it was a fatal goring during a bullfight in 1947 that made him a legend. Like rock stars, bullfighters rarely age well; they become parodies of their former selves or struggle to adjust to everyday life. Dominguín was a tragic figure in later years – an alcoholic recluse in Sotogrande, a millionaire’s enclave in southern Spain, his ...”

“... Mourner’s Kaddish on my phone. A local farmer had directed my guide towards a couple of stubs of rock, the only remnants of dozens of gravestones that had long ago been removed for use as building materials. Brown hens pecked at the grass. It was impossible to tell where my ancestors were buried or the location of the mass grave containing five hundred of ...”

“... l i m e n t i I SURE dew agree re/Aiken. Eliot’s low saurian vitality ... when the rock was broken out hopped marse toad live and chipper after 3000 or whatever years inclaustration. For anyone who prefers to concentrate solely on the negative side of the Pound ledger David Gordon’s selection inevitably ...”

“... plate. He wanders off into the back-blocks. Then one day he stubs his toe on a glittering rock that turns out to contain silver and goes on to open the mine that will make his fortune. In this parable, if you can lose yourself and let go of representation, you get lucky. Bail’s first stories are five-finger exercises in the comic futility of trying ...”

“... pacifying Kandahar or pummelling Gaddafi is somehow essential to preserving their way of life. David Nichols has written a slight, narrowly focused book that provides modest but not inconsequential insight into the origins of America’s involvement in the Greater Middle East. His focus is the Suez Crisis, or more specifically, the way Eisenhower’s ...”

“... by gassing, starvation and lethal injection to their doctors’ ‘aristocratic’ values. David Blackbourn took the lead in dismantling this paradigm. With Geoff Eley, he wrote The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in 19th-Century Germany (1984), which attacked the new orthodoxy on a number of fronts. Blackbourn’s main ...”

“... here he was, tanned, yoga-fit, like the unofficial leader of a libertarian party: legalise dope! Rock ’n’ roll and free phone-calls. A late-night TV pundit, a wrinkly hero at Megatripolis, wowing the non-voters, the under-age certainties. While the wobbling jogger, Bill Clinton with his Airforce One, on-board haircuts costing thousands of dollars, his ...”

“... one thing: the manufacture of The Who. It is in his promotional and creative work on behalf of a rock band that father-and-son symmetries are unexpectedly conspicuous: ‘The qualities that Constant found in the ballet were those that Kit adapted and magnified in the band. Their performance required different forms of expression to be mingled; they combined ...”

“... music should express the general anxiety. I: the more the sea rages, the more precious a hard rock among the waves becomes. He: but no one will understand the meaning of this rock; besides, what is this feeling of calm based on – on health, self-assurance, individual personality? I: on the emphasis on God. He ...”

“... so far rightwards that it isn’t really the same party any more. In that process of migration, David Blunkett was one of the key players. Blunkett is important not only because of how he behaved when in office – we’ll get to that in a moment – but also because of the journey he took to get there. A man who from 1980 to 1987 was the leader of the ...”

“... regular invitations from the community of particle physicists who admire my films as much as rock musicians, skateboarders and various other enthusiastic denominations do.’ Herzog likes to insist that a director should be more of an athlete than an aesthete and, perhaps as a result, the memoir devotes a great deal of attention to the human body in ...”

“... immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over everything there hung the threat of another, probably terminal war. The dawn of the postwar era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the ...”

“... rate rise was a consequence of the decision to exchange the relatively worthless Ostmark for the rock solid Deutschmark at the deeply patriotic rate of 1:1, thereby absorbing the former and temporarily weakening the latter. So Thatcher was right – German reunification did spell big trouble for the UK – but for the wrong reasons. She didn’t foresee the ...”

“... and what a riot we shall have. Not a day shall pass without a fresh horror. Prometheus leaves his rock to cohabit with the Furies. Jack Yeats’s judgments are better-worded than most attacks on the innovative experiments of early Modernist poetry, but they make the same charges that would be repeated, with diminishing persuasiveness, for the next twenty ...”

“... In 1987, David Cannadine concluded an essay on what he saw as the dark and doubtful state of British history with a call to ‘fashion a new version of the national past which can regain its place in our general national culture, and become once again an object of international interest’. A job application posted through the unusual medium of a scholarly journal? I doubt it, but it may be that this essay found its way onto a desk at Penguin Books, leading to Cannadine’s appointment, in 1988, as general editor of the new Penguin History of Britain ...”