“... sleepy under heavy lids, but they were eyes which missed little and gave nothing away.’) Edgar Wallace, dictating to a harem of secretaries, didn’t feel the need to blather on about how ‘the criminal justice system has favoured criminals for the last forty years.’ Neither was he stuck with a hero who is increasingly embarrassed at being spotted in a ...”

“... from his friends what he later felt had been severe mental suffering, not least when his brother David fell to his death from a hotel window at the age of 19; most of all, he concealed the Game, and had a lifelong terror of people finding out about it. He admired Rimbaud and drank heavily; Barbara tried to coax him away from the bottle. He went off to Spain ...”

“... Salam on electroweak gauge theory; and, of course, Darwin and the undercelebrated Alfred Russel Wallace on evolution by natural selection. Every instance of what has been called ‘simultaneous discovery’ lends credence to the notion that the individual does not matter in the course of science, or matters in a very different sort of way from authorial ...”

“... end of the decade rare ‘class’ was being shown by such public-school amateurs as Peter May and David Sheppard. In 1949, such was the craze for sport, 90,000 people turned up to watch the FA Amateur Cup Final. As Anthony Bailey, who watched Portsmouth when they won the League Championship two years running, fondly remembers, ‘football shorts were long and ...”

“... politician. ‘In some respects,’ Woodward writes, he ‘was a walking example of what novelist Wallace Stegner calls “resilience under disappointment”, the persistence of drive, hard work and even stubbornness when ambition has not been fully realised’. In State of Denial, he’s a monster.When Jay Garner returned to Washington in the summer of 2003 ...”

“... more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better,’ he wrote to Wallace Stevens teasingly in 1935. ‘It is so we are saved from being literary … Our poetry comes choppy, in well-separated poems, well interrupted by time, sleep and events.’ As a boy, he told his friend Bernard De Voto, he had been entirely normal: ‘I ...”

“... the Pinochet coup. Was there any contact between the Thatcher entourage and such groups as Colonel David Stirling’s GB 75? Did Mrs Thatcher know that Airey Neave had been involved in discussions about raising a ‘resistance army’ if Labour were returned in 1979? 3. Airey Neave was later killed by a car bomb outside the House of Commons. It has always been ...”

“... who opposes a net zero emissions goal has in becoming a university vice chancellor. As Lord Wallace of Saltaire remarked in the Lords debate on the higher education legislation last year, ‘If challenging the allegedly oppressive liberal cultural elite means insisting on climate change sceptics being appointed to senior academic positions regardless of ...”

“... was still an individual, not a corporate activity; not the rebel as Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace plus army, but the rebel as Sid Vicious or David Bowie. For many Scots, self-determination, rather than nationalism, remains the cause. Now, 35 years later, were I living in Scotland, I’d vote yes to ...”

“... nationalism, as well as his middle-finger politics and his ‘America First’ ranting, comes from David Duke, the former grand wizard of the KKK; from George Wallace, the segregationist governor and former presidential nominee; from Joe McCarthy, who thought America was being overrun by aliens; and from lynch-happy Pat ...”

“... rise of black feminism in the 1970s. In Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978), Michele Wallace traced the movement’s ‘love affair with Black Macho’ back to Native Son. Black women writers never forgave Wright for having once accused Zora Neale Hurston of writing ‘in the safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro ...”

“... On​ 18 June, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people ...”

“... the fatal tendency of the Conservative governments to which Britain has been subjected since 2010. David Cameron’s declaration in January 2013 that, if the Conservatives won the next election, they would offer a referendum on membership of the EU – which wasn’t a significant concern, never mind a priority, for British voters – is a fine ...”

“... blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention and quiz Blakey under my breath: Do you think I look like a MAN? B. gives me an appraising glance but is non-committal. Then everything lands on our table in a ...”

“... table at Newnham. On the same day he wrote with two plots for short stories, an account of reading Wallace Stevens aloud and an admission: ‘I neglected you. That’s one of my most tormenting thoughts that I didn’t suck and lick and nibble you all night long and it’s a thought I shall never let myself in for again once I’ve had the chance to mend ...”