“... That’s all I’m having to do with Victoria Beckham, except to say that she and her husband, David, in their relationship with the press, have taken the notion of abuse, the abuse of one set of human beings by another, to levels that make Billy Connolly’s childhood seem like a chapter from The Swiss Family Robinson. They ...”

“... lithe, an inspired mimic. Everyone who met him, even those who disliked him, felt his vitality. David ‘Bunny’ Garnett noticed his ‘beautiful lively, blue eyes’, and that he was ‘very light in his movements’. He also maintained that Lawrence’s hair colour, or non-colour – it was reddish-fair – was characteristically working-class. When a ...”

“... the one hand, and on the other, an art addressed to the commodity and its spectacularisation. It may not be going too far to view this as the delayed victory of those Constructivist and Dada tendencies which earlier challenged Modernism as part of what proved to be the historically premature revolution of the early 20th century. Shorn of the revolutionary ...”

“... remote, even quaint, the Tres Grandes of the Mexican School – Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros – are often treated as a single entity. Where distinctions are made, the didacticism of Rivera’s work tends, and I believe deserves, to be unfavourably compared to the expressionist passion of Orozco, and even to the ungainliness of ...”

“... his own. Not everyone in the business swooned in admiration when they first encountered Wal-Mart. David Glass, who years later succeeded Walton as chairman of the company, travelled down to Harrison, Arkansas, to see the opening of one of the new shops: It was the worst retail store I had ever seen. Sam had brought a couple of trucks of watermelons in and ...”

“... culture with ‘an ongoing global process of political liberation from Western rule’, as David Murphy puts it. To drive this point home, representatives of Swapo from what is now Namibia, the African People’s Union from Zimbabwe and the ANC and Pan-Africanist Congress from South Africa were invited, and marched in the opening ceremony, a street ...”

“... of all Liverpool’s problems, though her monetarist experiment (which I discussed in the LRB of 8 May) exacerbated them by doing huge damage to Britain’s industry in the early 1980s. Her sub-Powellite rhetoric – ‘People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’ – did nothing for race ...”

“... was fifty. In a prophetic essay that appeared during the high Thatcher years, the young historian David Cannadine wrote in the LRB (6 June 1985) that ‘Briggs has often been described as a steam-engine scholar, pounding along the tracks of historical endeavour like an express train at full throttle.’ No ascetic, he loved good food and drink as much as ...”

“... the measuring instruments he had devised couldn’t be deployed. Alvarez did as he was told, and may have been the first person to describe the appearance of the ‘mushroom cloud’. But he had desperately wanted to be there for the big moment, and even forty years later could still recall his rage: ‘I was absolutely furious, angry with [Oppenheimer] as I ...”

“... a house’s sale price. In the 1930s it was 2 per cent.) When Thatcher entered Downing Street in May 1979, more land was owned by the state than ever before: 20 per cent of Britain’s total area. Today the figure is 10.5 per cent. The disposals include council houses, forests, farms, moors, royal dockyards, military airfields, railway arches, railway ...”

“... stone in a peach and it must exist before one can ever begin to start thinking constructively. In May he decided to have a break and, on a friend’s recommendation, took a boat from Narragansett to Block Island. There he saw the charred remains of the Ocean View Hotel, which had once claimed to have the world’s longest bar – 101 stools – and hosted the ...”

“... evidence that at the time was streaming into US intelligence agencies. Already by late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the ...”

“... into the reading room.’ And it’s used defensively, to protect her privacy. ‘Have written to David Godwin pretending not to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the ...”

“... the digital-oriented sense) that it’s not easy to see where the accumulated labour in them is. David Harvey’s lectures on Capital, for instance, the best beginning for anyone studying Marx’s most important book, are of immense value but they’re also available for free on the internet, so if you buy them as a book – you can take in information much ...”

“... about his second film, Le Petit Soldat, he invoked Welles’s The Lady From Shanghai, which David Thomson has seen as ‘deconstructing’ film noir. Une femme est une femme reminded him of Lubitsch’s supposed ‘failure’, Design For Living, and Richard Quine’s decidedly minor My Sister Eileen. Godard treated Hollywood as a kind of conceptual ...”