“... land weapon. But for it to succeed a spate of quite new strategic concepts was needed. For J.F.C. Fuller, ‘the War of 1914-18 was a blind evolution from mass to machine fighting, for whereas mass by multiplying numbers begets defensive power, machines by enhancing mobility beget offensive power.’ Fuller had joined the Tank Corps in France, at ...”

“... to exploit this insight. Since childhood he’s been a fan of another chameleon and shape-shifter, David Bowie, who was raised, like the author, in Bromley. Similarly, Kureishi’s next novel The Black Album was named after a bootleg LP by Prince to whom the main character, Shahid, is devoted. Prince plunders freely from various musical genres, from rock or ...”

“... of the price war’s principal targets. (‘Don’t worry about the Telegraph,’ Murdoch told Sir David English of Associated Newspapers in 1993. ‘Leave them to me. I’ll put them out of business for you.’) Knowing that Black knew Murdoch socially, my friend asked him if he had ever brought up the subject of the price war. Black shook his head. He ...”

“... names,’ Amis confides at one point, ‘it’s amazing how it lowers . . . the tone’ (Lord David ‘Cess-hole’, for example). Getting the tone down to sewer-level became an end in itself, with much verbal japing along the way: ‘Fucky Nell’, ‘a bit of an R-scrawler’ and so on. Above all, the Amis-Larkin correspondence was an abattoir ...”

“... lambent dullness played around his face’) – satire as longing, as true poetry. David Nichol Smith said: ‘He could not have given us our greatest epic; but he is our greatest satirist.’ Pope, who offers some strong competition, must have learned from Dryden the interaction of these two ideas. The gift in the older poet that provokes this ...”

“... parties remains activated in the present stand-off. Economic tensions, carefully explained by David Styan in Unfinished Business, have continued to simmer, while old ideological grievances between the Tigrayan and Eritrean movements, exacerbated by the TPLF’s constitution for a post-Cold War Ethiopia, have given way to something like hatred. One of the ...”

“... Ghanaians, Communist Party etc.’ There wasn’t much truth in these claims. ‘At its height,’ David Gibbs writes in The Political Economy of Third World Intervention (1991), ‘the communist intervention in the Congo comprised no more than 380 Soviets and Czechoslovaks – against 14,000 UN troops and many thousands of Belgian military ...”

“... of being tickled to death. The damage is the digitised version of the Hollywood experience, which David Mamet once characterised as ‘like the beginning of a love affair: full of surprises and you’re constantly getting ...”

“... for a great range of thinkers, including Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a moment.Guy Standing is a long-standing member of BIEN, the Basic Income Earth ...”

“... a dizzying subplot, he also involved himself intimately in the quarrel between Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion over the project of a Jewish National Home, and in the attempts by both to play off the British against the Americans. And, though he showed himself able to take risks in leaking classified material that favoured the Zionist cause, he also found ...”

“... of the American Automobile Association, in a state of morose torpor. Every now and then an F-18 from Miramar Naval Air Station, just a couple of miles to the north, would scream over the house on one of its morning practice flights, rending the sky with a colossal sonic boom.My mother, oblivious to the booms, prattled away happily and brought up her ...”

“... Gide and Wells and James and Bennett, of course, and also Max Beerbohm, Samuel Butler, Galsworthy, David Garnett, Hardy, Robert Hichens, W.H. Hudson, Lubbock, H. de Vere Stacpoole are mentioned, also Forster’s close friend G.L. Dickinson. Of another, highly gifted friend, Virginia Woolf, he has very little to say, merely a glancing though favourable ...”

“... Natalie Rolls, also a Blyth councillor, didn’t return my calls. The town’s Reform mayor, David Swinhoe, was also shy. Nor could I reach the most prominent Reform councillor from Blyth, Barry Elliott, the Trump-like figure who came second to Ronnie Campbell in 2015 and who beat Deirdre Campbell in this year’s county council elections. Elliott is a ...”

“... and zakat simply cannot go to Palestinians without donors risking a federal investigation. As David Feige explained in Slate after the mistrial, the HLF was accused of ‘aiding a terrorist organisation by helping it spread its ideology and recruit members. Translation: even those who support good works are guilty of terrorism if the good works make the ...”

“... is likely, they have paid attention to the discussion of recent studies such as Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s Unjust Rewards (2008) or Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s The Spirit Level (2009).* But what should remain shocking is the way in which the officially endorsed language of ‘aspiration’ occludes the stark facts of economic inequality in ...”