“... masterplan: he is paid £250,000 a week. (Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that, as David Conn has been jaw-droppingly reporting in the Guardian. Tevez’s ‘economic rights’ apparently belong to an overseas investment company whose ultimate ownership is opaque, and is being disputed in court by post-Soviet oligarchs.) What you get for your ...”

“... for dead. The last full-scale history of English literature that anybody has bothered over was David Daiches’s two-volume Critical History of English Literature. When it appeared, in 1960, it was thought gallant but defeated. For a successful history of English from a single pen, we must no doubt go back to Saintsbury, who is still readable. There is ...”

“... and car crashes, he finally made it to AP’s Washington Bureau in the summer of 1965. Lyndon Johnson had just stage-managed the Gulf of Tonkin incident into a congressional carte blanche that would dramatically widen the US war in Vietnam. Hersh, soon the senior AP man in Washington, was quickly introduced to the mendacity at the heart of the war. In ...”

“... Ali’s latest book is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power. David Bromwich Like the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, the rockets from Gaza were a choice of tactics of a spectacular vengefulness. The spectacle was greater than the damage: no Israeli had been killed by a rocket before the IDF launched their ...”

“... too knowing or too perky among the native flora and fauna of his examples. Dennis Enright and David Rawlinson pass the test with flying colours, and their observations not only shed light on the topic but add their own quota of good things to the many they have selected. They are well aware of the possible drawbacks, and of the fact that friendship and ...”

“... a specialism in the new psychology. Now it has been extended still further. Kinsey and Masters and Johnson and a host of more or less meretricious popularisers have quite literally brought it home. Sexuality has passed from the bench to the couch to our very own bedsides. But the domestication of this series of pseudo-sciences is not the liberation of ...”

“... the landscape is not as bleak as he suggests. Paulin finds room for two such poets, Linton Kwesi Johnson and John Cooper Clarke, though I might not have echoed his choice from the latter: the 82 uses of ‘fucking’ in 50 lines would perhaps be more effective in performance than on the printed page. One of the main difficulties for theorists of an organic ...”

“... was over it effectively ceased to exist. It is true that individual politicians like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove will be pursued by some of their referendum pledges for as long as they are part of a government tasked with delivering on the result. But they have the advantage of being able to claim that the voters should judge them on their record in ...”

“... taken a monumental strong-arm operation of persuasion and coercion, the sort to make even Lyndon Johnson quail. Instead, he threw the case to people who didn’t even know the phone numbers of the people they needed to call. It really was one of those what-if moments. Not: what if the president of the United States were revealed to be an evil ...”

“... or “prisoner”’ of her former joint chiefs of staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. Boris Johnson, letting off steam after a tough session at Number Ten with the chiefs of staff, alluded to Hill’s crusading work against people trafficking: ‘That’s modern slavery, right there.’ Under May the Blairite informality of shirtsleeve, sofa government ...”

“... as the archetypal Delta bluesman, a precursor to Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James and Robert Johnson: vagrants, rounders, always on the move – pursued, as Handy put it, by ‘suffering and hard luck’, conceiving their music ‘in aching hearts’. Hari Kunzru’s new novel is, among other things, a fictional meditation on the figure of the ...”

“... was held in the same year, at the University of London. Studies by Peter Fryer, James Walvin and David Dabydeen appeared in the next few years. Fryer, whose Staying Power is still the most detailed – and most often consulted – account of the subject, gave more than two hundred talks and lectures at adult education centres, schools and public meetings ...”

“... they fail to see in it a reflection of the particular social conditions of modernity. For Samuel Johnson, it was the socially typical which was imaginatively enthralling, and aberration which was boring. Johnson had a proudly populist trust in the robustness of routine meanings, and saw language as embodying the common ...”

“... it tends to make their characters pretty angry. Made to suffer cancer, Christie Malry warns B.S. Johnson that he will look stupid when they discover a cure, and anyway, ‘you shouldn’t be bloody writing novels about it, you should be out there bloody doing something about it.’ Jonathan Coe drops in to tell Maxwell Sim that his book is about to end; Sim ...”

“... divided but exceptionally feeble. One needn’t be quite as scathing about Neil Kinnock as R.W. Johnson has recently been in these columns in order to agree with him that the idea of Kinnock at No 10 is disturbingly like the idea of Jesse Jackson in the White House. And one needn’t put too much weight on Peter Jenkins’s account of Mrs Thatcher in tears ...”