“... undertakers hover in their closing pages), then at least from the crystal set to iPlayer. David Hendy’s book has the strengths of an insider’s account, packed with detail and anecdotes, shrewd in its assessment of personalities, light on socioeconomic change. Simon Potter’s is more academic and astringent. Potter tends to be critical where Hendy ...”

“... in whose company he ‘could drop his guard’. Cows were early subjects – he told his friend David Wojnarowicz that he’d taken a photo of them from a great distance when he was first experimenting: ‘The cows were like a hundred feet away. I mean, three little black dots … but I knew it was cows in a field.’ As an adult, he took some striking ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley, One-Dimensional Woman by Nina Power and The Meaning of David Cameron by Richard Seymour, all of which grew from their authors’ blogposts. Such works amounted to ‘a kernel of a whole new left public’, according to another of Fisher’s friends, Jeremy Gilbert, professor of cultural studies at the University of ...”

“... who had come for Christmas dinner. These included his two daughters, Lucy and Lynda. ‘Lynda was wearing her Christmas gift from her father,’ Caro writes, ‘a loose-fitting red shift; [Johnson] reached out and bundled up the fabric, to prove, he said with a smile, that she wasn’t in a family way.’ Lynda was 19 at the time. How the journalists ...”

“... of high status all over the world look out from magnificent portraits, defying all encumbrances. David Cannadine’s study Ornamentalism wittily captures the ways the governors and viceroys of the British Empire vied with Indian rajahs and African kings in their spectacular apparel, all of them arrayed in plumes, festoons and baubles. Something about ...”

“... except their labour. In their 1979 case study of Terling, a village in Essex, Keith Wrightson and David Levine described a massive upward redistribution of wealth between 1525 and 1700, and descriptions of early modern society since theirs have been full of people like Edward Ballard, a ‘pore needy felloe’ with ‘noe certen place of aboad’ living apart ...”

“... Coalition Ass is funny. The idea, as well as the drawing, of ‘The Right Hon. Dress Suit, wearing his Jimmy Thomas’ is funny. (George Lansbury said he could never again see Thomas without thinking of it.) Low was also remarkable for his good humour. This is exemplified in his Lloyd George, whom he never managed to draw as other than lovable; in the ...”

“... it until his death. After he had swallowed something once, he never stopped taking the medicine. David Caute begins The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (1973) with the story of Hewlett and Nowell escaping from the World Peace Council and clambering aboard a local bus going they knew not where and Hewlett saying to the driver: ‘Tickets ...”

“... who gained international notoriety, mostly through celebrated trials: Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Ericka Huggins, Elaine Brown. But rather than focusing on the sensationalist and salacious aspects of the party’s history – the confrontations, violence, criminality – Bloom and Martin choose to recount ...”

“... through which visitors are sucked in an atomised state before recondensing at the HoH, often wearing fewer clothes. One character gets there through the end of a drinking straw; another makes the journey via his own urethra, an experience that’s described as ‘odd’ and ‘self-referential’. Many things are possible at the HoH: reversible ...”

“... to find out his height and weight. His careful accounts of weigh-ins take note of what he was wearing, whether he was carrying a sword and what he had in his pockets. When it came to his height, however, he was defeated. There was no easy way of doing it and according to his biographer Kate Bennett, Aubrey was reduced to saying that he could get one hand ...”

“... interned in Les Tourelles, before her transfer to Drancy. Was she picked up for vagrancy? For not wearing a star? In Modiano’s work the ‘Place de l’Etoile’ is both the location of the Arc de Triomphe and the site of the Star of David worn by Jews during the Occupation. The narrator doesn’t know why she was picked ...”

“... emotions, the memories that bubble up in a person over sixty seconds; where she is; what she’s wearing; what she can smell, taste and hear; who she’s with; what she’s saying; not to mention what contribution this 0.069 per cent of a day is making to the meaning of her life? C.M. Lucca, the writer created by Catherine Lacey to narrate her fourth ...”

“... depending on insider knowledge only others in the trade need feel troubled or titillated by. David Lodge, quoted on an Adair dust jacket saying that The Death of the Author is ‘brilliant, worthy of Nabokov’, is doing something of this kind, pretending innocence, tactfully avoiding the question of pastiche, of who’s actually in charge of this ...”