“... and, more violently, how much they loved the heavily lipglossed singer in a band called Japan. David Sylvian was his name. The girls called him David. So far as I remember, the diary was a pretty spectacular fantasia of adolescent lusts and local hatreds: Dear Katherine, David came ...”

“... materials, because Guston apprenticed himself as a muralist, influenced by Mexican masters such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and intensely preoccupied by considerations of social justice in action. His works were monumental, site-specific and scattered, and not all have survived. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) employed him from 1935 onwards to ...”

“... child growing up in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side a few years before the First World War. David Schearl, the protagonist, lives in terror of his father, an implacably resentful man called Albert, who boils with rage every evening while recounting real or imagined workplace slights: ‘They look at me crookedly, with mockery in their eyes! How much can ...”

“... thoughts occur like ‘I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or ‘There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’ So I was happy to read in Gavin Lambert’s Mainly about Lindsay Anderson* that Lindsay harboured similar thoughts about such self-imposed menialities. On the eve of filming O Lucky Man Lindsay has his ailing ...”

“... From the start,’ David Szalay writes of the protagonist of his first novel, London and the South-East (2008), ‘he had felt his way towards a more subtle style – offhand, low-intensity.’ Although style, in this instance, relates to Paul Rainey’s telesales manner, the words seem to anticipate the evolution of Szalay’s writing towards the lean and laconic prose of his latest novel, Flesh ...”

“... now published as At the Same Time to be her final collection of essays. After that, says her son, David Rieff, in his foreword, she intended to get on with what she most valued, writing fiction. Edited by her, somewhat differently no doubt, this would, then, have been her next book. As it is, published two years after her death, and put together by Rieff and ...”

“... only strengthened the cult of Marat. In his funeral procession, hastily arranged by Jacques-Louis David, Marat’s bathtub was carried through Paris by members of the Society of Revolutionary Women, and his corpse (bathed in aromatics to disguise the stench) was shouldered by a dozen men. Weeks later his heart was placed in an urn looted from the Tuileries ...”

“... to be careful about messaging. But the words FUCK OFF GOOGLE in giant letters on a purple sheet held up in front of a blockaded Google bus gladdened the hearts of other San Franciscans. That morning – it was Tuesday, 21 January – about fifty locals were also holding up a Facebook bus: a gleaming luxury coach transporting Facebook employees down the ...”

“... enclosed, distinctive world of their own. There are very few good British novels about sport, and, David Peace aside, hardly any about football – despite its place in our culture. In A Natural, Raisin delves into the life of a lower league English football team – a subject never covered before, as far as I know, in literary fiction. Perhaps it doesn’t ...”

“... In January, the Mail on Sunday led with an interview with the former chief Brexit negotiator David Frost: ‘I think people have been sold a kind of view that the net zero transition can happen without much increase in costs or problems. That’s obviously not the case and people are now seeing that.’ The Daily Mail quoted Julian Knight, chair of the ...”

“... South Africa through a European-style industrial revolution compressed into twenty years. David Goldblatt (b.1930) began taking photographs in the gold-mining areas in his teens. Many of them, and the ones that followed, tell the story of South Africa’s labouring classes, predominantly black, in a world shaped by race laws and extractive ...”

“... ended up as leading figures in the Stalinisation of its eastern half. This picture seems to have held, roughly speaking, until the present day. But some important modifications have been achieved by, for example, Gabriel Jackson, who, in The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, firmly anchored the conflict in the controversies which preceded it, and without ...”

“... and macabre: a serious criminal charge leading to a committal hearing at Minehead in Somerset (held just six months before the 1979 general election, at which Thorpe lost his seat), all culminating in a Bonfire of the Vanities trial at the Old Bailey in the summer of 1979, at the end of which Thorpe and his three co-defendants were all acquitted of charges ...”

“... to wade through Hansard for the entire period, looking for significant utterances which could be held either to have changed Labour Party policy or to have influenced its creation. Sitting in the LSE library with the bound volumes, I developed a subliminal ability to spot a possible candidate for the book while my mind wandered to other things. A little bell ...”

“... to the United Nations University, and as chairman of a government committee on nursing. He has held a clutch of decorous and dignified offices, as Chancellor of the Open University, and as President of the WEA, the Social History Society, the Society for the Study of Labour History, and the Society for the Social History of Medicine. And he appears ...”