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“... 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 ...”

“... it: ‘In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt.’ In a similar mood, David Thomson published a biography in which every chapter ends with a dialogue of self-examination by the critic, and in which Welles’s best-known innovation is side-swiped and helped to its feet all in the course of a sentence: ‘In truth, there was more ...”

“... Spain is a traditional rival of Britain in most international affairs, from the World Cup to the Rock. Moreover, the Spanish were verbal supporters of the Argentine side in what’s usually called by Spaniards la guerra de las Malvinas. They, too, refuse to call the islands Falklands. But this is not the first time that the Nobel Prize-winner of 1982 has ...”

“... The Moon is 240,000 miles from the Earth. The surface temperature is 134ºC. Age of the oldest rock collected from the Moon: over four billion years. Then we have the first in a serious of perfect Stroudisms: driving time (to the Moon) by car at 70 mph: 135 days. Walking time at three miles per hour: 8.6 years. The water on the side of the Earth which ...”

“... with a chairman who accused me of being a disciple of Sorel, a writer of whom I had barely heard. (David Caute sardonically notes that ‘the allusion to Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile to the New Left: one may search in vain for any favourable reference to Sorel in New Left ideology.’) I had also been National ...”