“... the new study of forensics had given the police, ‘the principle of the trace and so on’. As David Gibson recounts in Planting Clues, Locard was also a keen botanist. One of the scores of cases he included in his textbooks described a man who had been found murdered in the countryside outside Lyon. A group of suspects was rounded up. Inspecting one of ...”

“... less scurrilous contemporary Bob Dylan. But he was less tied to the 1960s than Dylan. He disliked rock music, preferring the rural blues and string-band music of what Greil Marcus called ‘the old weird America’, and poked fun at hippies.* Crumb was famous but not as famous as he might have been (or as rich). For most of his career, he received equal parts ...”

“... his personal jeweller for two hundred wrist watches that flashed both cross of Jesus and star of David. Such personal touches were far more Elvis than any of the books that had been recommended to him. Soon life would again be games with lascivious starlets and golden guns and awesome dune buggies. Soon he would be home again and primed for every day’s ...”

“... of image. (Which is itself already quite modern.) Before Keith Richards, before punk, here is rock and roll animal Arthur Rimbaud with his anti-gravity shock of lightning strike hair. A queer Pan with italicised attitude, Rimbaud gets the Leonardo DiCaprio film and David Wojnarowicz mask. All Baudelaire’s best-known ...”

“... climb out, a snake in a new skin flashes by, and Richard cries out; another boy crushes it with a rock; and it is left to Richard, because he is fearless, to free the snake from its agony by smashing its head with a smaller rock. This brings him great credit with the other boys; but his killing is misunderstood, as his cry ...”

“... ask because I wasn’t sure I did. So I looked it up and a sinkhole is ‘a hole formed in soluble rock by the action of water, serving to conduct surface water to an underground passage’. In other words, you might be swimming in the Sacramento River – water so sediment-thick you can’t see your hands – when you feel a tug at your feet and your ...”

“... London’, where social climbing, drugs and mechanically-assisted sex take her to ‘rock-bottom’ (or is the bottom the top?). From India she returns to East Anglia and a demonstration at an airbase. Something happens there involving a bomb, a suitcase in a neolithic flint-mine, a helicopter, a watchtower, a child, and a sheep with two ...”

“... to illustrate various aspects of working-class life in Useful Toil and Destiny Obscure. By 1981, David Vincent had found 142 memoirs spanning the years from 1790 to 1850, and in Bread, Knowledge and Freedom used them to explore the response of ordinary people to economic and social change. In 1989, Vincent, Burnett and ...”

“... Bible into Chinese. (‘He boned up feverishly on Manchu,’ enthuses his other biographer, David Williams, in his schoolboyish way.) Borrow had to argue in Russian with the Tsar’s board of censors, hire and supervise ill-educated Estonian compositors to set up Mongolian print (which, he said, ‘differs little from the Mandchou’) and prepare to ...”

“... fought around that phrase, and the whole question of quality. And something was won. The Minister, David Mellor, accepted that ‘exceptional circumstances’ could include quality. This he has now spelled out in the Bill. But it still leaves much unanswered. Little is laid down in relation to ensuring diversity. The customary reference to the broadcaster’s ...”

“... and instantly recognisable’ African rhythm) to the ‘folk-songs’ of the British Isles like ‘David of the White Rock’, ‘Loch Lomond’ and ‘Oh, No, John, No!’ All represented the ‘music of basic realities, the spontaneous expression by the people for the people of elemental emotions’. Robeson’s early ...”

“... and a seemingly loyal customer base, can quickly shrink to almost nothing, as happened to Northern Rock, who had been the main sponsors of Newcastle United for many years. Having ambitions bigger than your pockets these days can do a lot of damage in a very short period of time. Of course, as Ashley himself has suggested, Newcastle’s problem may simply be ...”

“... back to back. In mainstream cinema, performers mainly ‘go about feigning genuine humanity’, as David Foster Wallace wrote in his marvellous essay on pornography, ‘Big Red Son’. In porn, however, defences sometimes slip, and what Wallace has a porn fan characterise as the ‘what-do-you-call … human-ness’ of a person is allowed to shine ...”

“... and, more violently, how much they loved the heavily lipglossed singer in a band called Japan. David Sylvian was his name. The girls called him David. So far as I remember, the diary was a pretty spectacular fantasia of adolescent lusts and local hatreds: Dear Katherine, David came ...”

“... used to say. The new version is ‘Zimbabwe is kenge,’ which means roughly the same thing. David Caute’s portrait of white mores is savage, but like so many visitors before and after him, he was fascinated – seduced – by Rhodesia. It was, and is, a country which captivates even as it appals, and it has always been so much easier to explain the ...”