“... nexus, in favour of Spartan purity. The unlikely father of the ‘white cube effect’ was Casper David Friedrich, whose studio’s one ornament was a T-square dangling from the wall, a reminder of honest German craftsmanship in keeping with his penchant for woodwork and frame-design. Of course, Friedrich’s brand of mystical pietism was partly responsible ...”

“... that surrounds discussions of sexual conduct, whether risky and deviant or not. When I spoke to David Attenborough he was amazed to hear that someone he knew might have been named by others as part of the scene surrounding Gamlin at All Souls Place. I don’t hesitate to believe him: he clearly knew nothing about it. Others saw much more than he did and can ...”

“... Dylan’s ‘barbed-wire tonsils’ (Ian Hamilton’s words), his ‘voice like sand and glue’ (David Bowie’s). ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, Ricks says in his chapter on ‘Pride’, is saved ‘from being – in all its vituperative exhilaration – even more damnably proud than the person whom it damns and blasts . . . There can be felt in the refrain an ...”

“... a collection of essays that examine the physical and mental injuries inflicted by the civil wars, David Appleby addresses the problem of wandering soldiers. These were disbanded veterans, deserters and escaped prisoners of war, who frequently clashed with civilian communities as they tried to make their way home. Some didn’t have a home: the majority of ...”

“... sense of humour’: a phenomenon everyone considers to be distinctive but no one can define. As David Stubbs writes in Different Times, his impressive survey of British comedy on stage, radio, film and television, ‘it’s not so much a case of Britain producing comedy as comedy producing Britain.’ The book provides a good opportunity to look at our ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... height,’ he said, ‘and the weight of your chin, I’d recommend a hat with a broader brim.’ David Halperin’s new book, How to Be Gay, addresses the mysterious persistence of discredited elements from pre-Stonewall gay male culture. In theory camp should have been rendered obsolete by the arrival of models of gay behaviour not driven by the old toxic ...”

“... apart from where they happen to find themselves at a particular moment in their lives. Dorothy Jones, a music teacher in an unnamed northern town, has just retired to the nearby village of Weston; or, rather, to Stoneleigh, a new housing development at the top of a hill on its outskirts. Solomon, aka Gabriel, her next-door neighbour, the estate’s ...”

“... response. The same appropriation, however laced with self-criticism, continues through novels like David Leavitt’s While England Sleeps and films like Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom. Franco’s rule had the effect of marginalising the country culturally, in a sort of mutual boycott punctuated by skirmishes and scandal (Buñuel, for instance, tentatively ...”

“... make unlikely aesthetes and philosophers: the flattened affect displayed by Keir Dullea’s David Bowman in 2001 seems the more likely personality profile, or the slow psychological implosion of the cosmonauts in Solaris. But the characters in Orbital can’t leave the meaning of life alone. If Nell indicates the multidimensional field of view outside ...”

“... immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over everything there hung the threat of another, probably terminal war. The dawn of the postwar era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the ...”

“... range’ of the party’s new parliamentary candidates, he began to tell me about Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones. I hadn’t heard of him. ‘You should meet him,’ the MP said. A press officer cut in. ‘He’s a Devon farmer, who set up an amazing social programme, which Channel 4 did a documentary on, to help underprivileged black kids from inner cities escape to ...”

“... accusation of academic complacency. ‘Lightning, Phoenix, Arizona’ has the abrupt menace of a David Lynch dream sequence, the cardiac arrest when a previously straightforward narrative crosses the line and touches a vertiginous post-mortem truth. We need to be reminded of the ugly, petrol-breathed, epidermic floss sulking past our own windows. These ...”

“... Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like a chamberpot with holes and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s ...”