“... dismissed him as ‘spit in the horrible communitarian soup’ and one of his former acolytes, David Watson, wrote a book, Beyond Bookchin, ridiculing him. Bookchin replied to Öcalan that he was too ill to correspond with him. Öcalan wasn’t put off. He believed Bookchin’s work showed a way for failed national-liberation struggles to transform ...”

“... in CIA-funded experiments; a covert CIA operative was present on the trip to Mexico in 1957 when Gordon Wasson encountered the ‘magic mushroom’; Gottlieb’s physician, Harold Abramson, became an early proponent of LSD psychotherapy. But there are other ways of telling the story that don’t involve the CIA at all. The most conspicuous influence on the ...”

“... anything that would run into a fellow’s guts’. The subsequent riots were the worst since the Gordon riots of the 1780s, ending in chaos and a humiliating failed attempt to suborn the soldiers at the Tower. Half a dozen of the plotters, though not Castle, were indicted for treason.On the first day of these treason trials, three hundred desperate ...”

“... The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.22 February. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court, to jeer as the vans carrying the two ten-year-olds accused of the toddler’s murder are driven away. One man eludes the ...”

“... improving organisational capacity of the SNP during the 1960s; the discovery of North Sea oil; or David McCrone and Steven Kendrick’s elegant theory, which emphasises the role of television in a distinctly Scottish news media, producing a ‘Scottish frame of reference’ for contentious state planning decisions that could be exploited by the SNP.The story ...”

“... Sasser and Paul Sarbanes; and, as an apparent afterthought, one of Bourke’s summer neighbours, David Rockefeller. Getting wind of the commercial initiative, the NIH offered Venter more power, more autonomy and even more money, and in the UK the Wellcome responded similarly in support of the Medical Research Council’s sequencing work. By this time, Venter ...”

“... parents, and Acker was clearly eager to do both. In San Diego she finished her BA and started at David Antin’s poetry seminar, where she met another student called Len Neufeld. The pair of them ran away from their respective spouses to New York City, with the idea of making it big as writers, just as Patti Smith had a couple of years before.On arriving in ...”

“... the fatal tendency of the Conservative governments to which Britain has been subjected since 2010. David Cameron’s declaration in January 2013 that, if the Conservatives won the next election, they would offer a referendum on membership of the EU – which wasn’t a significant concern, never mind a priority, for British voters – is a fine ...”

“... her and forced her into his car. Its remit has now been expanded: it will also look at how David Carrick, nicknamed ‘Bastard Dave’ by his colleagues in the Met, raped and sexually assaulted at least twelve women over a period of seventeen years without being prosecuted. The Casey report into ‘standards and culture’ at the Met, prompted by the ...”

“... and Mabel’s favourite locations for their adulterous liaisons, although, according to Lyndall Gordon, who tells the whole story in lurid, gripping detail in Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds (2010), they proved adept at finding a range of love nests in Amherst, and even, or so their diaries suggest, took to experimenting ...”

“... intellectual and emotional energy, when he left Ireland and pursued a career in England. As David Bromwich has already pointed out, there is an English Burke whom O’Brien never makes known to his readers. He understands, and can excitingly depict, the oratory and politics of Burke’s House of Commons; but since he is intent on arguing that the ghosts ...”

“... in London. The Hadfields arrived in the autumn of 1779, only months before the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots broke out in the capital. The family was not directly affected. They were as usual in possession of excellent connections with ‘the first people of fashion’, including Reynolds and Kauffman, and they settled in Hanover Square. It was an uneasy ...”

“... American Military Adventure in Iraq (the most bearable of these excruciating war volumes), Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor’s Cobra II, George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate, Peter Galbraith’s The End of Iraq, and now Woodward: these books and many others present their versions of what went wrong, aim for a culprit, and hope that a firing or a ...”

“... providers, who in contrast will be nurtured into the new terrain’. On this matter at least, David Willetts, the minister responsible for higher education, has been clear: ‘The biggest lesson I have learned is that the most powerful driver of reform is to let new providers into the system.’ Note that word ‘reform’: the implication is that there ...”

“... it (‘When Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about,’ Gordon Brown was still quipping in the LRB in 1989). The Leninists to the left of Labour, meanwhile, were looking at history as a ‘series of repeats’ – crisis, general strike, Winter Palace, here we come – although history suggests that the ‘sharpening ...”