“... Earnest sadposts. Thirst traps. A bulging man who eats raw organ meat and calls himself the Liver King. A woman who whispers to you that you are a Mesopotamian artefact she is restoring. And I haven’t even mentioned the porn. Where is the corresponding fiction? Most of the recent works cited as examples of ‘internet novels’, such as Lauren Oyler’s ...”

“... Belushi, and, it should be added, few have been so telling or so readable as Indecent Exposure, David McClintick’s relentlessly documented account of the scandalous behaviour of the unsinkable executive David Begelman. Film and television documentarists have also been vigorously elbowing their way forward. A team from ...”

“... landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch and Plutarch. David Starkey begins an essay on Lord Morley by wondering whether we should class him like Prufrock as an ‘attendant lord’: ‘one that will do/To swell a progress, start a scene or two,/Advise the prince.’ Lord Morley never did become a royal ...”

“... support from celebrities, among them Rowan Williams, Emma Thompson, Grayson Perry, Noam Chomsky, David Byrne, David King (the former chief scientific adviser to the government) and Thunberg.Less well known is their following among lawyers, farmers (including livestock farmers), medics (last year the Lancet called for ...”

“... a man with wild red hair (looking like Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes) who brings Livesey and David Niven tea in the country house where some amateurs are rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This house seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall and also to the dream sequences that ...”

“... David Jones was staying in the Chelsea flat of the BBC’s Assistant Director of Programme Planning, Harman Grisewood, as the bombs fell on London in the autumn of 1940. During one raid, a near miss blew a bus off course; it went through the window of Sainsbury’s on the King’s Road ...”

“... Fourteen inches by 11, and weighing six pounds 13 ounces, David O. Selznick’s Hollywood is less a coffee-table book than a coffee table without legs. Its credits ape a blockbuster movie’s: ‘Executive Producer: Robert Gottlieb – Associate Producer: Martha Kaplan’, etc; and its first page opens like cinema curtains on a wider-than-Panavision main title modelled on Gone with the Wind ...”

“... not to leap, but to hang above the bull, like a dragonfly over the reeds,’ she wrote in The King Must Die (1958). She was inspired to write that book after seeing the original on a visit to Evans’s fanciful but thrillingly evocative reconstruction of the House of the Axe at Knossos in 1954.She left Oxford in 1928. Her parents expected her to return ...”

“... countless critical treatises, and even apart from his still oddly scandalous paintings at which, David Ellis reports, 13,000 visitors to London’s Warren Gallery gawked in the early summer of 1929, he was a figure of extraordinary fascination, even during his lifetime. Paradoxically, then, to contemplate works by the author of that famous critical maxim ...”

“... Party had kept secret during its uninterrupted period in power from 1948. The Labour patriarch David Ben-Gurion had called Begin a ‘Jewish Hitler’. Begin, a zealot but a legalist, had called Ben-Gurion’s extension of the repressive British Defence Regulations, although enforced mainly against Israel’s Arabs, ‘Nazi laws’ and vowed to resist ...”

“... disintegrated along with the mood he had captured and now seems inseparable from its time. Yet as David Como observes the book has earned ‘an enduring audience far beyond the walls of the academy’. It has also had a persistent influence inside them. When it appeared, the Levellers and Diggers had long been on the scholarly map, but the religious sects ...”

“... Anna, in the depth of the shot, as she paces restlessly up and down. In Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1982), fantasist Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro), on a first date with barmaid Rita (Diahnne Abbott), hopes to impress her by leafing through his autograph album. It’s not long before our attention drifts away from his dismal performance to the ...”

“... came to personify ... Starting with conventional middle-class – and working-class – beliefs in king, Country and Empire, he had the vision to see how these ideas must develop in the 20th century: defence of the country required not only adequate forces but collective international action, and the Empire must become a multi-racial Commonweath ... As the ...”

“... a thing. It alters obviously and with discernible intent, according to its audience: taking on King-like overtones for a crowd of black people; in the Midwest dropping the terminal g and dipping into homey cadences (‘What we’re tryin’ to do’); massively sober in speeches to Congress but relaxed in town-hall meetings (with reliance on the word ...”

“... trouble academically and emotionally.’ In a letter to a friend from 1966, reproduced in Richard King’s new oral biography, Travels over Feeling, the 15-year-old Russell is already referring to Walt Whitman, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg (prefiguring later, more explicit involvements with queer sexuality, paganism and utopian politics). There is also an ...”