“... In​ the spring of 1972, the poet Bernadette Mayer began to keep a journal for her analyst, David Rubinfine, whose patients included Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, and who was notorious for having married another patient, Elaine May, a decade earlier. Mayer was 27. In the journal – there were two, in fact; Rubinfine read one while she wrote in the other – she attempted to record her states of consciousness ...”

“... Vietcong hide-out in the Southern capital. Many readers, while enjoying Burchett’s racy style, may be critical of his opinions; there are also errors of fact. During the negotiations between the North Vietnamese and the Americans in Paris, Burchett writes of a misunderstanding between the chief American negotiator, ...”

“... a put-upon bear-leader struggling to get his charge to learn more and drink less, the whole truth. David Stevenson and William Sandys, tutors to Lewisham and Basset, emerge as significant characters with important contacts and interests of their own. Piranesi dedicated a print to Sandys while Stevenson is depicted with Lewisham among the crowd of cognoscenti ...”

“... is the parody Fox News banner running across the bottom of the credits: ‘Gender-fluid illegals may be entering the country twice.’ Many of the best lines are given to Tom, Shiv’s weak, sneaky, bullied-and-bullying husband. In one episode, the top executives of Waystar are on a corporate retreat in Hungary – or as Tom puts ...”

“... but call to mind the ‘theatre of cruelty’, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, scenes from David Lynch movies. This brings us to the crux of the matter. Anyone acquainted with the US way of life will have recognised in the photographs the obscene underside of US popular culture. You can find similar photographs in the US press whenever an initiation ...”

“... letters of Zidane’s name: the effect of his total presence is to obscure him completely. This may be the idea the film starts out with; it is not what makes it compelling. Watching Zidane at work in this way is an extraordinary experience. He is in possession of the ball for only a tiny fraction of the game, a total of perhaps two minutes or less. Much of ...”

“... that Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) can be distressed at the right time in his career. Or the effect may be amazing: all kinds of things happen in our minds if we learn that Napoleon is among the crowd at the guillotining of Marie Antoinette in 1793. As a matter of fact he was in Toulon at the time, putting an end to a royalist revolt backed by England and Spain ...”

“... the batrachoidal Farage likewise. ‘So where’s your sense of humour? It’s only a joke.’7 May. On the TV news footage of Stuart Hall arriving for the first day of his trial at Preston Crown Court; he is seemingly handcuffed with his hands held in front of him, but thus shackled has to negotiate the quite steep steps from the police van. At 84, he ...”

“... or at least its dedicated mourner. He has written a polemic against John Major’s Government and David Owen, the EU mediator in the remains of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, for their connivance in the ferocious dismantling of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is keen on Major’s New Labour successors, and confident that Tony Blair’s support for the Milosevic ...”

“... separate out the thread from the ball – rather than gather it up as Theseus had done. In David Copperfield, Mr Wickfield tells David he will ‘unravel’ a clue. In Great Expectations, Dickens refers to a napkin being wielded like a ‘magic clew’, leading ‘the way upstairs’. In The Moonstone, Gabriel ...”

“... Land became, within two years of settlement, a hospitable refuge.’ The seasoned and sensible David Collins, once the right-hand man of Arthur Phillip, the governor of New South Wales, in Port Jackson, now lieutenant governor of the Van Diemonian settlements, responded to diminishing supplies by ordering the purchase of kangaroo meat ‘at 6d per pound ...”

“... the summer of 2010, that is, when it was revealed that Low’s family was distantly related to David Cameron’s. Shortly after the prime minister returned from his first official visit to India, the Sunday Times broke the story that Low’s eldest son, Malcolm, had taken part in the brutal suppression of the rebels in 1857, leaving a graphic account in ...”

“... Constable grew increasingly preoccupied with printmaking and collaborated with the young engraver David Lucas to translate his oil sketches and paintings into 22 mezzotints, part of what would become known as English Landscape Scenery. Proofs survive, and are covered with the handwritten revisions and instructions with which Constable besieged Lucas: ‘two ...”

“... In Island of Shame (2009), a history of the military bases on Diego Garcia, the anthropologist David Vine reports that in 1960 a Pentagon policy paper advancing dominion was titled ‘South Atlantic and Indian Ocean Monroe Doctrine and Force’. From guano to copra to guns. Britain’s former colonies in Asia were none too happy as news about these ...”

“... fix the problem before its cost in blood and treasure agitated public questions. As the journalist David Halberstam emphasised in 1972 in The Best and the Brightest, the experts were less than wise. More important, the making of far-reaching overseas commitments without a Congressional and public consensus was a formula for political failure at home and for ...”