“... to ‘scrap the Human Rights Act, and introduce a British Bill of Rights’, but that was in David Cameron’s 2015 manifesto. Johnson’s manifesto promised only to ‘update the Human Rights Act’ – hence the IHRAR – not repeal it.The consultation document gives very little away about what a new bill of rights might look like. How closely it might ...”

“... and running. Laing had founded a group known as the Philadelphia Association along with Esterson, David Cooper, Clancy Sigal and Sid Briskin, and these men formed the core group of loving brothers. The idea had been to find a house in which people could live while in the throes of a psychotic episode, where the process of madness could run its course without ...”

“... turned critical of the Soviet Union, bitterly disappointing their hosts, were excoriated.Michael David-Fox’s Showcasing the Great Experiment is the story of Soviet wooing of the Western intelligentsia, focusing on VOKS under Kameneva and Arosev. About a hundred thousand foreigners visited the Soviet Union in the prewar period, many of them left-leaning ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his insouciance by turning up for an interview with a transistor radio playing pop music held up to his ear. The actor playing the role used to carry a real radio tuned to an actual broadcast. On the night in question it was suddenly interrupted by a newsflash: ‘President Kennedy has been assassinated.’ The actor quickly snapped the receiver ...”

“... The current world record of 579.63 yards (512 yards of carry before the ball has even landed) is held by Kyle Berkshire. Internal and external mediation are fused in the YouTube video of the feat, which includes ball-tracking. Techno-narcissism’s circuit is complete. According to Oppenheim, Wodehouse didn’t even bother to count his strokes. For Berkshire ...”

“... 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 ...”