“... more mysterious. They have been the subject of two previous books, by Mollie Gillen (1972) and David Hanrahan (2008), both called The Assassination of the Prime Minister. Linklater doesn’t add much information or evidence about the event itself, but he puts it in context, and provides fascinating if overblown speculations about the supposed ...”

“... By the end it was clear that Gordon was safe, but it was a close-run thing. If Alan Johnson or David Miliband had jumped ship, the game would have been well and truly up. The hope is that we can make it to the summer recess without any more calamities. After that, who ...”

“... the Paris Review, McSweeney’s and the New Yorker. He is also a journalist, specialising, like David Foster Wallace, in first-person-singular expeditions into curious reaches of American culture. Tower’s non-fiction adventures have included a bicycle odyssey along the New Orleans levee a year after Hurricane Katrina, a search for a possibly extinct ...”

“... only five other women in total (there were 60 men). She has seldom been included since. In 1970, David Shapiro and Ron Padgett’s anthology An Anthology of New York Poets left her out, but by then the so-called ‘second generation’ looked very different, and little of their style or substance can be traced to Guest’s influence. In Women, the New York ...”

“... and its bitterest opponent, Porter’s publisher and the Sierra Club’s executive director, David Brower, to float together down the Grand Canyon below the dam, arguing all the way. Neither of them imagined the fate the dam now faces. But others hoped. Two classics, or maybe three. The insurrectionary environmental writer Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The ...”

“... Roth’s scheme. In the exhilarating opening pages of The Dying Animal, the exuberant 62-year-old David Kepesh, ever ‘vulnerable to female beauty’, has evaded retribution for abandoning his wife and child many years before and, largely thanks to the genius that won him a professorship and regular appearances on radio and TV, has been able to enjoy a life ...”

“... nursing home, while ex-husbands, like the one in ‘Lichen’, show up with younger girlfriends: David in that story has two, one he brings along, and another shown only in a nude snapshot he presents to his ex-wife; it fades in the sun, so that the pubic hair resembles lichen, a metaphor for the pointlessness of male questing after youthful female ...”

“... created by the (pre-9/11) Terrorism Act, which recently made headlines with the detention of David Miranda at Heathrow, illustrates a long-term shift both in what is constitutionally permissible and in what is constitutionally acceptable. The former may be a matter for Parliament, but the latter is still a matter for the rest of us. Despite all ...”

“... disproportionately large share of resources. Important evidence of this sort of effect comes from David Haig’s work on the struggle between mother and foetus during pregnancy. Haig argues that foetal genes are selected to take more than maternal genes are selected to give. The result – borne out in many empirical studies – is a series of otherwise ...”

“... Rogers, Ingrid Bergman and Mary Pickford joined a committee to welcome her to Hollywood, where David O. Selznick sponsored an evening in her honour during which the Los Angeles Philharmonic played ‘The Madame Chiang Kai-shek March’. (As she was travelling west, the inhabitants of one small town lined up to see her when her train stopped to take on ...”

“... aptly termed the ‘crispation de nerfs’ in the painter’s work. In 1985, one art historian, David Lubin, turned the picture into an occasion for some psychosexual fantasising. Lubin also tried to answer the riddle Sargent had posed by deviating from a main source for the picture: Velázquez’s Las Meninas, one of ten works by Velázquez he copied on a ...”

“... of the latter, as you know, and he thought it was very good but he finally decided to acquire from David Godine, the American publisher who holds the copyright to both current translations, their version of The Prospector … Ravi knows Sue Berger (who worked for Godine) well, because they used to be colleagues in London when both were working for Penguin and ...”

“... in Axler’s proposed salvation-by-child, or by love or sex (‘He who forms a tie is lost’ – David Kepesh’s friend George O’Hearn, telling it straight in The Dying Animal). They won’t save him, and nor will solitude: it’s the absence of ties which has brought him to this pass. Axler has no family: no memories of dear Morty Sabbath to stay his ...”

“... During the break-up with Kimberly Quinn that precipitated his break-up with the Home Office, David Blunkett is reported to have warned her: ‘The law is on my side. I know because I made the law.’ It doesn’t quite have the melodramatic chill of Judge Dredd’s ‘I am the law,’ but it comes close. And it’s easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office ...”

“... theory with pop culture. He cites Billy Elliot and The Wire alongside Francis Fukuyama and David Harvey to discuss neoliberalism’s corrosion of the postwar social democratic consensus, Game of Thrones alongside Gramsci to illustrate the meaning of power. The book is aimed at the ‘youth without a future’, the generation for whom adult life will ...”