“... someone else back and that’s what neither of them was good at.28 March. Another death, this time David Storey whom I liked and found sympathetic, though I might run into him only occasionally and most often in M&S. It was always cheering, even if these days he was often shuffling as much from the medicines he was taking as from old age. But he would call me ...”

“... a field’. Probably the most beautiful and attentive drawing had been done five years earlier by David Hockney, in which Auden appears wrapped up in himself and a cigarette: ‘I kept thinking,’ Hockney reportedly said afterwards, ‘if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ Not everyone was struck in quite that way, but everyone was ...”

“... extended feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue Velvet) and that she resented Andy Warhol for making millions by turning her face into a silk screen image. What the book doesn’t do is discuss Taylor’s film performances in any depth. This ...”

“... parents, and Acker was clearly eager to do both. In San Diego she finished her BA and started at David Antin’s poetry seminar, where she met another student called Len Neufeld. The pair of them ran away from their respective spouses to New York City, with the idea of making it big as writers, just as Patti Smith had a couple of years before.On arriving in ...”

“... park lit with a curious violet effect. An interviewer in Diary of a Young Soul Rebel thinks of David Lynch and Hitchcock in relation to this scene, and certainly those names evoke the right sort of frozen ceriness. But there is excitement in the shot, too – a sense of sexual adventure. The mood is lyrical rather than frightening, and it is into this mood ...”

“... from a devout Christian congregation a hundred years ago if they had been addressed by Bishop David Jenkins. Under some conditions rationality and common sense are indistinguishable from blasphemy. This simply will not do. There can be no no-go areas for historians. Our job is not only to tell people what happened, but to try to explain why. Betroffenheit ...”

“... their tight formations, the ranks hold each other up; soloists are apt to droop. Dickens finishes David Copperfield uncharacteristically: ‘O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!’ It is intensely ...”

“... That effort, failing in Vietnam, produced the news reporter as American hero – Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, Seymour Hersch, Jonathan Schell, Peter Arnett. They reported not only the war the government did not want its citizens to see, but also the government efforts to invent a war for domestic consumption. ‘Part of the Vietnamese Seventh Infantry ...”

“... drug habit; Shane McGowan falls apart under the influence of amphetamines and alcohol; David Crosby and Stephen Stills are ‘too coked-up all the time’ to keep their band together; and – playing in front of a ‘zombie’ audience – the New York Dolls announce their desire to be ‘the tackiest boys in New York’ and no one, but no one, is ...”

“... male and female alike (and particularly the younger ones). Some of them, such as Dyan Sheldon and David Holden, have interesting things to say: others merely plod on across well-trodden ground. Stephen Wall’s ‘The Bridge’ is a wispy and indulgent fragment about a marital break-up and a one-night stand: old themes, old ideas, old forms, old ...”

“... with the censor. In this struggle, writers portrayed themselves with sly disingenuousness as David confronting Goliath. In reality, most writers believed that they, and not the state, would have the last word. And so it has proved. Ben Jonson’s lines are apposite: Nor do they aught, that use this cruelty Of interdiction, and this rage of burning; But ...”

“... beat us with, and pursues the possibility that their weaknesses might be the obverse of our own. David Nettler, the language expert who falls into Oitarian thought patterns, gives a long account of what it is like to enter that alien ‘mindscape’: Somehow the senses – the body – seemed to grow dim, so that it was an inert mechanism, like a corpse ...”

“... of the military importance of mechanical contraptions that can see where they are going. The late David Marr, whose posthumous book Vision generated an upheaval in the subject, insisted that vision be regarded as an ongoing process of computation, which begins with the optical images formed at the back of each eye and culminates in a spatio-temporal world ...”

“... cut to the same mould, all three buttons invariably buttoned. A short film about them, directed by David Zilkha and shown at Edinburgh in 1996, was appropriately entitled Normal Conservative Rebels. That G–G are at the same time photographers and principal subjects obviates, as with Cindy Sherman’s pictures, any sense of exploitation, so often an aspect of ...”

“... It is often said that the British are obsessively interested in secrecy. It is less often said how deep and peculiar this obsession is, and how much more there is to it than the well-known fact that British authorities are exceptionally secretive. Our interest is in secrecy as much as in secrets: it is the process, the practices and irregularities of keeping and revealing secrets, that concerns us ...”