“... an advocate, at the Oxford Union, of the birch and stocks; Chris Huhne, later energy secretary in David Cameron’s cabinet; Jeremy Hunt, the current health secretary. Johnson liked teaching and had a taste for the rough and tumble. His great day was not as a young man who worried about apartheid, or a feisty libertarian outnumbered by big French Stalinists ...”

“... dismissed him as ‘spit in the horrible communitarian soup’ and one of his former acolytes, David Watson, wrote a book, Beyond Bookchin, ridiculing him. Bookchin replied to Öcalan that he was too ill to correspond with him. Öcalan wasn’t put off. He believed Bookchin’s work showed a way for failed national-liberation struggles to transform ...”

“... but instead they look a bit tacky and amateurish: middle-aged, mothballed Thunderbird puppets. As David Stubbs puts it in Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany (2014), there is ‘the air of belonging to some bygone astronaut era, veterans of an abandoned space project.’ The fact that Kraftwerk have produced so little since the ...”

“... on the prominence of ‘the morbid and the tragic’ in his own work, the Guyanese poet David Dabydeen once said that ‘the plantation experience had severe and traumatic psychic impacts … but overwhelmingly had to do with what is the very ground of our being, which is our body.’ This is an obvious reason slavery goes with revenge tragedy. The ...”

“... by the CIA, are a familiar plot device across the spectrum, from literary fiction (Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace) to mass-market movies (The Ipcress File, The Parallax View, Jacob’s Ladder, the Bourne franchise) and TV (The X-Files, Stranger Things). The story is always the same: mind control is real, and those who know its secrets operate with ...”

“... But Noel kept me in the loop, dropped by a couple of times a month with news about the agent David Obst or the director Peter Bogdanovich, both dying to do Mallory. He drank bourbon, and when his glass was empty he held it high and rattled the ice cubes for a refill. He stayed until the bottle was empty and it was time to find another roost. He made ...”

“... of the Castlereagh years. He will already have run into one of Downing Street’s newer recruits, David Canzini, a former colleague of Lynton Crosby. Canzini’s instructions to his cohorts have a daunting clarity: ‘Find the wedge issues in your department and hammer them.’ The concept of the ‘wedge issue’ has been familiar in Australia and the US for ...”

“... The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.22 February. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court, to jeer as the vans carrying the two ten-year-olds accused of the toddler’s murder are driven away. One man eludes the ...”

“... selection of speakers, who ranged from Patrick Heron to Victor Burgin, Mary Kelly to Robyn Denny, David Hockney to Rasheed Araeen. The highlights included Lisa Tickner’s brilliant dismemberment of Reg Butler’s defence of his question: ‘Can a woman become a vital creative artist without ceasing to be a woman except for purposes of census?’ Peter ...”

“... failed to respond to this compliment with any valuable acknowledgment, Thomson, Aaron Hill and David Mallet prepared satirical verses on unsatisfactory patrons to preface the second edition of ‘Winter’. Compton stepped in in time (with civility and 20 guineas), and Thomson judiciously persuaded his friends to tone down their verses, or at least to ...”

“... ear for prose. Craig Raine is represented in this selection by a poem of his own and another by David Lodge, who parodies the Martian approach so successfully that you wonder if it has quite enough to it. Blake Morrison’s ‘Xerox’ is a poem to be memorised now if you did not cut it out of the paper and keep it, but he already had a reputation so anyone ...”

“... and Johanna, walking through the Alps to Lake Garda, are joined by two friends: Terry (based on David Garnett), and Stanley (Harold Hobson). At one point Johanna and Stanley are not to be found. Later, as Johanna and Gilbert go on alone, she explains that Stanley ‘had me in the hay-hut – he told me he wanted me so badly.’ Here Noon has to meet the ...”

“... spring into sharper relief. Read both and then, suddenly, parts of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, David, Matthew or Paul take on new life as provokers of laughter or suppliers of depth or authority. As time went by Rabelais deepened his sense of comedy and its problems. In Pantagruel and Gargantua he is aware of the cruelty of comedy but seems untroubled by ...”

“... Tate) and Lady Catherine (1804, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland); William Turner and Sir David Brewster (inventor of the kaleidoscope) were frequent guests; on his solitary rides in the Lakes he often called on De Quincey (then editor of the Westmorland Gazette), and visited William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, whom Andrew describes in a letter ...”

“... By comparison Pepys’s linguistic aberrations have an innocent air. It has been pointed out by David Nokes that the Companion is distinctly reticent about sex. In this it reflects the new edition as a whole: the facts are there, but not dwelt on (good) or ever really analysed (dubious). Not only is there no entry for Sex (as Nokes again observes, ‘Health ...”