“... 12 pages on writing down variant names and titles for Martin Chuzzlewit, or 16 on trial titles for David Copperfield. It is all the odder since, as Thackeray cattily noted, Dickensian names such as Micawber are as unlike real names as Micawber himself is unlike a real person. No one in the history of British society can have been called Chuzzlewit, let alone ...”

“... AD’, but that, in its very essence, time was now ‘man-made’ and ‘man-co-ordinated’. From David Landes’s work we know that in exactly the same year in which the Thirteen Colonies declared their Independence, London’s Gentlemen’s Magazine included this brief obituary for John Harrison: ‘He was the most ingenious mechanic, and received the ...”

“... other artists who had treated the subject (most notably Pietro da Corona and Jacques-Louis David) had done so, is the subsequent decision made by King Seleucus to give Stratonice to his son to save the boy’s life. I take it that this is the act which could be described as the father’s ‘melting’. And yet the King’s grief for his son is surely ...”

“... vivid feel for characterisation, that of adolescents in particular, as if the first part of David Copperfield were being written today in exotic places. Paradise concludes in a fashionable aporia – its author is after all an academic – but both novels seem successfully to resist the anxieties of contemporary influence, and to behave, as it were, in ...”

“... love scene? The question remains under-explored, despite Richard Smith’s assertion that David Bowie and Mick Jagger in their gender-ambivalent days ‘caused more than a few confusing erections’. Sadly he doesn’t give sources. There are more unanswered questions. If there is indeed some link between homosexuality and cross-dressing, what is ...”

“... a quintessential experience with their fellow Americans. As it turned out, not even the terrible David Letterman managed to squeeze off a burst about Mr Simpson or anything related to the trial. The evening was, as some magazines have taken to claiming on their covers, ‘100 per cent O.J.-free’. In truth, the industry does not quite know what to make of ...”

“... When the Allies gathered at Potsdam in July 1945 to organise the postwar world, it is unlikely that any of those taking part had ever heard of Vietnam. The actual name had been eliminated, the prewar French colonialists having divided the country into three, and on the surface, the postwar arrangements for that part of Indochina were clear: first, Chinese and British troops would enter and then the French colonial rulers would return ...”

“... I read it in Heinemann’s Best Short Stories, the annual selection edited by Giles Gordon and David Hughes. I made a mental note of the author’s name, Helen Dunmore, because I’d never heard of her before. A name to watch for, I thought, and watched for it in The Best of Best Short Stories, 1986-95. Dunmore was not included, which I thought a puzzling ...”

“... Almost forty years after the first European settlers pitched their tents at Sydney Cove, two men spend the night in a bush hut beside a creek on the inland side of the coastal range. Between sleeping and dreaming, the men talk intermittently until dawn. One of them, Michael Adair, is an officer in the penal colony’s regimental corps, and has just spent 48 hours in the saddle, riding up from the coast at the express orders of the Governor of New South Wales in order to oversee the hanging of the other man at dawn ...”

“... is a monument to white supremacy. The book and film offer different variations on the theme: the David O. Selznick production replaced Mitchell’s celebration of the Ku-Klux-Klan with a visually unforgettable paean to ‘the cavalier society’ of antebellum Atlanta, with its ‘knights and ladies, masters and slaves’. Atlanta was actually a frontier ...”

“... than Thompson could provide. (Gold Medal signature-writers of the time included John D. MacDonald, David Goodis and that thriller writer’s thriller writer, Peter Rabe.) So during the late Fifties, when most of his proposed literary projects couldn’t find a buyer, Thompson went on to do some of his best work for Stanley Kubrick’s early films, The Killing ...”

“... others. On 27 October 1916, a statue of Owain Glyn Dŵr was unveiled at Cardiff’s City Hall by David Lloyd George. A marble firmness of jaw, to say nothing of encomia that spoke of ‘splendid courage’ and ‘the advancement of the people’, hinted at a linked destiny. Within weeks, the leader of the whole island of Britain was a charismatic Welshman. A ...”

“... the flightless and the fully fledged, to one function only: masculine power. According to David Halperin, one of the most sophisticated members of this school of thought, ‘the symbolic language of democracy proclaimed on behalf of each citizen, “I, too, have a phallus.” ’ The herms are Hermes no longer, but a symbol of the patriarch, not ...”

“... to be predictable: nobody could be considered a maverick nowadays for admiring Jackson Pollock or David Smith, and Hughes’s heart clearly belongs to the least challenging, most superficially appealing of the major abstract artists – Robert Motherwell and, of course, the semi-abstract favourite of those who don’t really like abstraction, the tasteful and ...”

“... and then in America, built an experimental scanner which used a computer to reconstruct images. David Kuhl transmitted the first image of a living human thorax in 1965, using a radioactive source and a computer monitor, while Ronald Bracewell, back in the Fifties, had done work on the mathematics of image reconstruction in the context of radio ...”