“... Crumb (1994) presented its subject as a curiosity, neither hipster nor punk. If anything, with his Coke-bottle glasses, buck teeth, bow tie and stingy-brimmed fedora, he seemed freakishly straight – an American type not unlike William Burroughs or David Lynch. The film featured interviews with his older brother, Charles ...”

“... a young man invites himself in, exchanges some small talk, then asks Humiston if he can do some coke. When Humiston agrees, the visitor shoots up with a mixture of cocaine and heroin, and slides into a narcotic stupor at the end of the bed. The out of his depth out-of-towner is hardly an original theme, but it’s a rich one, and Humiston’s tale – the ...”

“... headquarters’ in another flat at number 7. The apartment was briefly a refuge for a detoxing David Bowie, who wanted to hide from the attentions of his coke dealer while his own Berlin flat was being renovated. In her fitful correspondence with Froese, who was one of her teenage idols, Hugues mentions the kaleidoscope ...”

“... living, however eminent. Take Mike Newell, who wanted Rupert to do a bit of work for the role of David Blakely, the guy killed by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England. Newell wanted to see Rupert’s pain. But, as Rupert himself admits, he was ‘a riddle as an actor. On screen, I had a lot of “feeling” but I couldn’t really act. On stage ...”

“... of men’, ‘Meditations’ not-quite-joked: ‘all I want is boundless love.’ ‘Having a Coke with You’ pursues the very traditional theme in which every alternative pleasure pales beside the presence of the beloved: ‘Having a Coke With You/is even more fun than going to San ...”

“... and with more wit than sense.’ The actor offers no comment, but by now he doesn’t need to. David Gates, the creator of these connoisseurs of disappointment and self-sabotage, published his first novel, Jernigan, in 1991. Joseph Heller called it a ‘sizzler’ and Michiko Kakutani announced in the New York Times that Gates had ‘established himself as ...”

“... was Southern Italian. You might as well have been in Palermo, except the buildings were newer. David Chase, The Sopranos’ creator, grew up in Essex County. Fort Lee is Bergen County, but never you mind. I played as a child with Tony Soprano and his pals, if you can imagine them as eight-year-olds. During recess and the lunch hour the schoolyard at #4 ...”

“... Fish. Fish’s salaries and lecture fees have been part of the lore of academic culture since David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), where he appeared thinly disguised as Morris Zapp, who, ‘enviably offered his first job by Euphoria State, had stuck out for twice the going salary, and got it’; and who had ‘the professional killer instinct’ in a ...”

“... he went to Paris, aged 17, and lived on a secret allowance from his mother. Bridget Astor, wife of David Astor, former editor of the Observer, remembers his being ‘always considered a very glamorous figure around Torquay’. His uncle introduced him to osteopathy, seeing him as a clever drifter. Ward went to America, loved the Americans for their affability ...”

“... was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.After leaving Satya, she moved into a flatshare with Armstrong in Boston. Her luminous ...”

“... Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat ...”

“... littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie. In the 1980s, the American poet David Antin charged that ‘anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for undergraduates to swear off Evian, in the hope that tap-water drinkers could afford unabridged books rather than hackneyed ...”

“... be cut. Or a future government could choose to abolish them, as the radical free marketeers of David Lange’s Labour Party did when they came to power in New Zealand in the 1980s. Many British farmers support Brexit. Others fear it would destroy them. The National Farmers Union has come out against, arguing that without subsidies, most British farms would ...”

“... mother of Solomon, and finally as J, mistress of the sublime and the uncanny as well as of King David. In this new book Bloom cheerfully accepts the reviewer’s proposal. That the author of what eventually became the Torah should have been the relict of the unlucky Uriah, and not an Israelite, but a Hittite, was plainly irresistible. Henceforth, he ...”

“... attempts to connect Thomas More’s defence of ecclesiastical interpretative prerogative to Edward Coke’s similar claims for legal expertise, without apparently being aware that More’s own concept of law was essentially transparent. In contrast to matters divine, More desired that secular law be written so as to ‘be read or understood by every one of the ...”