“... is cruelty in it.’ At Oxford he made friends with two other able autobiographers, David Thomson, the future BBC producer, and Denis Hills, the African explorer, destined to be rescued by James Callaghan from the clutches of Idi Amin. Michael Wharton spent much of his term-time practising West Riding Knife Throwing with his mates, or drinking ...”

“... Wilson could imitate his true identity as a bluff, plain-speaking Yorkshireman to perfection. David Cameron once worked for a public relations agency and looks as though he was assembled by one. From Reagan to Schwarzenegger, the line between politics and performance has become increasingly blurred: during the US presidential debates, a soi-disant ...”

“... and there is even a computer game in which you can play at bashing the British at Canton. Wasn’t David Cameron aware of all this when he arrived in Beijing in November 2010 wearing a Remembrance Day poppy in his buttonhole? Or the right-wing press, when it heaped praise on him for allegedly refusing to remove it when the Chinese asked him? That will have ...”

“... gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic struck them as fairly ...”

“... New Negroes. The twins have been away – fighting in the First World War, pimping in Little Rock, working as enforcers for Al Capone in Chicago – and have come back to Clarksdale to escape the racism in the north for the ‘devil we know’. They decide to open a juke joint, and buy a derelict mill from the town’s closeted KKK leader, Hogwood (...”

“... from the outside is what drives The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Frankenstein, or the films of David Lynch. To watch yourself from outside is, according to the textbook, to watch yourself as dead – and both Hall and his hero understand this all too well. Holed up in his flat, Eric Sanderson reads letter after letter sent to him by ‘the First Eric ...”

“... to see Satie is not as a classical musician who failed to become a great composer, but as an art-rock star avant la lettre. His career contained all the phases of 1970s art-rock history, though not in the same order: a proggy occult phase, a glam phase, a Bryan Ferryish lounge pop phase, a Brian Enoish ambient phase, a ...”

“... happened next was the first bank run in the UK since the 19th century, the collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007 and its subsequent nationalisation. Northern Rock had an unusual business model in that instead of relying on customer deposits to meet its operational needs it borrowed money short-term on the financial ...”

“... over his life and over his conduct as a leader of the Revolution, and what is soon evident about David Lawday’s spirited and highly readable biography is that he stands Danton in a flattering light and pays insufficient attention to movements in the shadows. ‘The Gentle Giant of Terror’, the subtitle calls him: which suggests, along with revolutionary ...”

“... of sin. Is this ‘artful whiteface mockery of pious racists’? In his new biography of Wheatley, David Waldstreicher encourages us to think so, and to read the lines in a ‘mocking or satirical instead of a beseeching voice’, so that we can hear Wheatley ‘become the organic intellectual of the enslaved’.The poem shows Wheatley working within narrow ...”

“... David Gibson was a man stiff and parsonical; by all accounts the sort of man who got things done. You could say he was obsessed with ridding Glasgow of its slums, with turning them into something bright and high and unquestionably modern. That’s what he wanted, and he’d already made vast advances towards getting it when he became convener of Glasgow Corporation’s housing committee in 1964 ...”

“... Most of these kids turned out to be runaways from Middle America who had flipped on too many Sgt Rock and Fantastic Four comic books. My favourite was a 16-year-old from Tennessee who called himself ‘Kid Blue’. When I last heard from him he was phoning (he said) from the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, where the CIA had kidnapped and were torturing ...”

“... Bye Bye’ by NSYNC. When shortly afterwards a demo of a song by the vastly successful rock band Metallica turned up on Napster, the industry finally roused itself to action. Conglomerates such as Universal spent much of the decade engaged in legal pursuit of bedroom file-sharers, many of whom were allowed to walk free by sympathetic juries. One of ...”

“... And indeed, in his 1862 book The Illustrated Natural History – Birds, the Rev. J.G. Wood, the David Attenborough of his day, states that the cream-coloured courser ‘seems to live chiefly in Barbary or Abyssinia’. In the late 1860s, with the publication of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, the word ‘barbarian’ acquired a new resonance. Arnold ...”

“... the city lively and cosmopolitan. Ida painted, using ‘an old man model’ who sat ‘like a rock’. They made friends. By the autumn she was pregnant and adapting her wardrobe. Adaline was asked for a ‘loose black lace evening blouse … with long sleeves but not transparent – & a little low neck cut round – and perhaps streamers down the ...”