“... forged a letter to get a portrait of Byron from his publisher John Murray. In her history, Lord David Cecil wrote, ‘side-by-side run always two stories, what happened to Caroline and what she pretended had happened.’ With her there was, too, a wider than usual gulf between precepts and practice. She told Murray that the only rules necessary for a safe ...”

“... offensive that this should be the only description of that marvellous novel. Stevenson uses David Lodge’s image of contemporary literary production as ‘an aesthetic supermarket’ in which an ‘astonishing variety of styles’ are on offer, and links this with Malcolm Bradbury’s similar picture of ‘a great shopping mall world of ...”

“... was anecdotal evidence of abuse of the present system by a handful of asylum-seekers; but, as David Heath MP pointed out, the normal way of dealing with abuse of a system is to put an end to the abuse, not the system. Only the year before, a high-speed process of statutory review by the High Court had been instituted. In the course of an unusually loud ...”

“... part. Here is a 1957 letter about their relationship from O’Hara to Ashbery, which appears in David Lehman’s useful The Last Avant Garde (1998): I don’t see any use in either of us going through the strain of pretending we like each other as much as we once did. I don’t know why, for instance, he has singled me out for the accusation that I’ve ...”

“... Professor Crick’s subject is important and his research has evidently been diligent. We now know a lot more about Orwell than we did, and the increment of knowledge is not always trivial. Why, then, is it impossible to commend this book with warmth? For two main reasons: first, in a work of such length the prevalence of carelessly written pages is a strong disincentive to continuing (and of course they are shown up all the more by their proximity to quotations from Orwell); and secondly, Orwell was a literary figure as well as a political thinker, and Crick’s literary touch is far from certain ...”

“... signal he was instantly cut off by the control room. The irresponsible announcer in this case was David Tennant, who was also guilty of starting off John Duckworth on a poetry reading with instructions to keep going until Tennant returned, after which he forgot about him. ‘I am told,’ Matheson noted crisply, ‘that he went on until half past ...”

“... Scarborough as his prizes. But while ‘John Paul Jones won the propaganda war,’ the historian David Pendleton told me, ‘much of that is down to his famous line, which he almost certainly never said, and the fact he brought the war to British shores. The convoy was carrying a cargo essential to the British war efforts. The Serapis and the Countess of ...”

“... dissidents and sometimes collaborators, not survivors of labour and concentration camps. (David Nasaw’s The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War, published in 2020, pays close attention to the way the distinctive character of Jewish suffering was effaced as American churches or charities began lobbying on behalf of ...”

“... masculine sceptic while Mulder is the feminine believer. (What a man! I would exclaim as I watched David Duchovny in his little swimsuit. What a man!) It is not in the riverine quality of her voice, banked by reeds, sometimes pierced low by waterbirds. It is not even in her partner’s reaction, his one liquid larger pupil, the soft hopeless hope that he turns ...”

“... unpaid sovereign debt, and the supply-chain financing tycoon Lex Greensill, who hired David Cameron to lobby the UK government for business and was later disgraced and bankrupted.The biggest Vision Fund bet was WeWork – essentially a real estate company that leased commercial buildings in big cities, fixed them up with communal ...”

“... party, both started out as ‘terrorists’. Begin was behind the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed nearly a hundred civilians; Shamir planned the 1948 kidnapping and assassination of the UN representative Folke Bernadotte. Yitzhak Rabin, revered among liberal Zionists as a peacemaker, oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of ...”

“... any memory of his existence’ and so changed her son’s name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel: ‘Hamel’ was the name of her next husband; she wanted to preserve the ‘J.D.’, but the Donald had to go. He’s only been known as ‘J.D. Vance’ – sometimes with dots, sometimes without – since 2014, when he changed his name to honour ...”

“... daydreams of its future as a world guru. In his later avatars as a Tory MP, a science minister in David Cameron’s cabinet, Baron Johnson of Marylebone, a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a dabbler in Adani’s honeypot, Johnson turned instead to describing how the ‘new India’ was ‘helping shape this young century’.Such U-turns occur ...”

“... crowds increasingly ‘decomposed into solitary consumers’. The rise of ‘superstar DJs’ like David Guetta and Fatboy Slim displaced the ranks of faceless techno artists who hid behind pseudonyms like T99, LFO and B12. Dancers have been increasingly monitored and vetted, steered into ticketed venues and subjected to invasive security checks, often ...”

“... A Transparent Novel (2004) touches on similar questions. It’s about another public performance, David Blaine’s 44 days living without food in a Perspex box suspended over the Thames. One girl is convinced that the box is made of glucose: ‘When he thinks nobody’s looking, can’t you see the bastard licking?’ Other onlookers call him ‘a fake, a ...”