“... time the lonely outsider commemorated by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and (more cannily) Wordsworth. David Fairer maintains that their Wertherisation of Chatterton’s alleged suicide concentrated the Romantic poets’ minds on their own social isolation, on the necessary dissidence of the poet’s task and the short time reserved for its performance. Chatterton ...”

“... of emotion,’ Vernon recalls of his friendship with Jesus. ‘My buddy, who once did the best David Letterman impression you ever saw, has been abducted by glandular acids.’ (Compare Richard Tull’s lament in The Information that, at 45, he no longer ‘snags on the DNA’. Amis is being literary; but Vernon is not supposed to be a writer.) For all the ...”

“... after last-minute doubts made her abandon her wedding; from her room, she writes letters to David, the married lover she left back in England. Their affair is undone by his self-indulgence, the egoism that allows him to whisk Edith into the wings when she threatens his comfortable life at home: ‘She knew that he was a man who could not deny himself ...”

“... the dulling effect of habit. In Writing against Time, drawing on the work of the neuroscientist David Eagleman, Clune looks at the way ordinary experiences are affected by repetition. When we first perceive something, time seems to slow: ‘the moment of perception swells’ and ‘the “fraction of time” expands.’ But the effect fades after the first ...”

“... of European or American Muslims and benefit only the West seems to escape their attention. David Cameron and other Western leaders insist, as they do after every outrage, that the problem is radicalised Islam and therefore the responsibility lies within the religion. (Why was Catholicism never blamed for the IRA offensives?) The real problem is not a ...”

“... with it, as he suggests in the account of a primal scene he gave in an interview with David Sylvester: Childhood’s important to me, and it’s when I first came into contact with art. This happened when I was around four or five. One of the greatest pleasures I remember is looking at a cereal box. It’s a kind of sexual experience at that age ...”

“... and turned a scholar into a suppressor of evidence. I suggested the problem was one mentioned by David Hackett Fischer, that history is what the evidence says it is. If the evidence is fragmentary, misleading or missing, then the history is just going to be wrong, or at best incomplete. No, no, no. That was alright as far as it went. But Spender-Lehmann were ...”

“... on this premeditated and systematic degradation of the humanity of an entire population, David Cameron characterised the Gaza Strip as a ‘prison camp’ and – for once – did not neuter this assessment by subordinating his criticism to proclamations about the jailers’ right of self-defence against their inmates. It’s often claimed that ...”

“... Inquiry by Sir Kevin Tebbitt exposed as lies Tony Blair’s claims about his own role in the David Kelly affair; Blair staggered on in office for another four years. Bill Clinton survived the unmasking of his perjurious deposition in the Paula Jones case and on-camera lies about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. And so it goes on. Whatever, as Blair ...”

“... marker-penned slogans, or doodles, or quotes from Goethe; a sinister ballpoint-pen portrait of David Cameron and cards written by solicitors Birnberg Peirce explaining that you don’t need to give your name if searched. The walls are a sort of slogan competition, in the manner of a JCR suggestion book or a library toilet wall: which ones will last? In the ...”

“... with wartime controls was an aberration. (Wartime America was much less obedient.) Cartoon by David Langdon for ‘Punch’, November 1949. Mark Roodhouse’s answer to the crude question of just how much black market activity there was in Britain, both during the war and in the period of postwar austerity, is that, though widespread, it was far less so ...”

“... for its innovations and its geniuses and scoff at it for thinking it invented human nature. (David Hume, late of that parish, invented human understanding, or a treatise of that name, and that’s quite different.) Meanwhile, we can love Glasgow for its rebel spirit and its demotic energy while noting the piousness of Bearsden and Milngavie. Scotland ...”

“... with accounts of visits to Adolf Grünbaum in Pittsburgh, to Richard Swinburne in Oxford, to David Deutsch in Headington, to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a way of evoking possibilities as much as seeking ...”

“... called Miqbal, Abdullah, Hana and Najiba were naming their children Gladys, George, Pauline and David (as well as the all-American ‘Junior’). Yet of all the Shadid and Samara descendants only Anthony felt compelled to return to Marjayoun. Rooting himself in the soil of his family history, he hoped, would compensate for the peripatetic life of the ...”

“... and Exit Ghost. The Dying Animal is ‘a Kepesh book’: that is, the ‘I’ of the novel is David Kepesh, remembered from The Breast and The Professor of Desire. Now the lecherous Kepesh is old enough to suffer impotence, to fall victim to jealousy, and to witness the assault of cancer on the breast of a youthful lover’s body. The story is set at the ...”