“... not convinced.’ There were also mutterings about an excessive ‘fondness for the society of young women’, and allegations that he had foresaken Oxfordian conservatism and turned ‘sharply to the left’. Just before leaving for his curative sea voyage Collingwood had submitted his Autobiography to the Oxford University Press. He had always got on ...”

“... I was ushered in to Colonel Klindt’s office. ‘I have come to request a visit to my husband, David Kitson,’ I said. ‘No visits for Kitson.’ He did not even look up. ‘Look –’ ‘It’s no good being difficult, lady,’ he said. ‘No visits for Kitson and that’s it. If you want to apply again tomorrow, well, that’s your affair. You can ...”

“... to pass off their own forward movements as Northern invasions – almost a year before June 1950. David Rees feebly attempts to neutralise the South’s belligerence by stating that ‘Rhee called rhetorically for a march north.’ No one who has read what Rhee said, and ordered, could fairly describe his actions as ‘rhetorical’. Rhee and his entire top ...”

“... the cowboy statue has sought protection from the elements and taken shelter indoors. Florence has David, also transferred from open to inner space; Orange County has John Wayne. Orange County, where unfettered individualism rises from a government-subsidised foundation in mineral wealth, agribusiness, aerospace and real-estate speculation. When John Wayne ...”

“... was made into a film by Steven Spielberg. In Spielberg’s AI, scientists build a humanoid robot, David, who is programmed to love. David expresses his love to a woman, Monica, who has adopted him as her child. Current experience suggests that the pressing issue raised by the film is not the potential reality of a robot who ...”

“... harsh and inviolable. Even Wilson’s feisty subject timed her pleasures to its unalterable rhythm.David Henkin sets out to discover how Americans became such creatures of the seven-day week. By the time the United States was founded as an independent republic, he writes, North Americans were already ‘by the contemporary standards of Europe … particularly ...”

“... activists weren’t the only ones who were interested in this development: seated among us was a young woman who had already been seen at the pre-trial proceedings. She didn’t chat with anybody, didn’t identify herself, and was widely assumed by reporters to be from the CIA. I approached her one afternoon and casually asked where she was from. She ...”

“... of placating her, Begley says: The image that recurs again and again in his writing is of that young boy lying on the floor, busily drawing or tracing or colouring, or doing the same at the dining room table under the stained-glass lampshade, reproducing the comics and cartoon characters that he so loved, already certain that his efforts would meet with ...”

“... dreamed up much of the look, the attitude and the lyrics, though not the sound. A full year before David Bowie adopted the same hair style, Westwood had her hair bleached blonde and cut ‘coupe-sauvage’ style: tufty, asymmetrical and barmy-looking. She went to America and dressed the New York Dolls. Together, she and McLaren assembled the Sex Pistols, whom ...”

“... here rather than an error. Still, I don’t think we need to see Joyce as being disingenuous – David Greetham wonders about this in an essay in a booklet accompanying the new edition of Finnegans Wake – since we know what he could do with bits and scraps. In his letter he continues: ‘But then I never read Rabelais either though nobody will believe ...”

“... as if they/Could master all things.’ All this has a bearing on the before and after story that David Ellis wants us to take more seriously as the real story of Byron’s life. In Ellis’s view the summer of 1816, which he spent in Geneva, marked a turning point in Byron’s life. He was, Ellis tells us, acutely unhappy there, though the unhappiness had a ...”

“... Yankee games on the radio, recalculating each player’s batting average after every time at bat. Young Ralph was on the way to becoming a strange and difficult man. Nader’s work habits, ambition and obsession with detail got him to Princeton, where the number of dead birds on campus led him to demand an investigation into DDT (a decade before Rachel ...”

“... which jumped around all over the place when he talked – which was a great deal of the time’. David Gascoyne described in his journal in 1936 how Jennings dominated a meeting of the English Surrealists, ‘as usual … boiling over with energy and excitement’. He reported, too, the scene when Jennings and Tom Harrisson met to discuss the formation of ...”

“... South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present day, and however right or wrong Blair may be in believing that they will be kind to him, it is unlikely that either his ...”

“... racecourse and the music halls. The diminutive Harry Relph began his career in blackface, as ‘Young Tichborne, the Claimant’s Bootlace’, soon to be abbreviated and immortalised as Little Tich, whence ‘tich’ and ‘tichy’ – a delicious way to remember the gargantuan Claimant. Those who took a class-based view of things were bewildered and ...”