“... who occasionally accompanied him. Gurney also went to stay with the family of another poet-to-be, F.W. Harvey. The tendency to distance himself from his own family became more pronounced when Gurney went, in 1911, at the age of 21, to the Royal College of Music in faraway London. Howells followed him in 1912, and Gurney returned there after demobilisation, in ...”

“... Cholmeley, but in each case orchestrated by Thomas Drury. A letter discovered a few years ago by David Riggs further highlights Drury’s involvement, because it shows he had a prior connection with Lord Keeper Puckering. On 8 November 1592 Lord Buckhurst wrote to Puckering: I did speak to Mr Drury according to your Lordship’s desire, and after a long ...”

“... massacred there. We scraped off some wads of chewing gum that visitors had stuck on the Star of David (bored Lithuanian schoolchildren, I imagine, engaged in zero-degree desecration), and we said Kaddish for the dead. Before we headed back to town, we stepped into the tiny, one-room excuse for a museum that has been built to commemorate the horrors. There ...”

“... that they could not be Borked. Stealth has its own dangers. Bush thought he had a neo-con in David Souter, but he had been misinformed. He did a better job the next time. Clarence Thomas had arrived in Washington at the age of 31, and never left the Beltway thereafter, so his neo-con development could be carefully monitored. At 43, he had put in loyal ...”

“... whose name you’re likely to hear among the tarnished tower-blocks of the new town is that of David Coulthard, who is the official patron of the city’s race-circuit down near Highway 15. Sequestered in his lugubrious quarters at Most, Kelley spent some of his time writing. His alchemical treatise, De Lapide Philosophorum, published at Hamburg in ...”

“... in vain for Quddus Ali to regain consciousness. Even the nail-bomb planted in Brick Lane by David Copeland in April 1999 didn’t check their will to reclaim the streets of Whitechapel. How strange then that this novel, part of it set in 1985, has so little to say about the campaign of violence and intimidation which marked the lives of almost every ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since Martin’s, Bate’s should finally disprove Dickens’s dismissal of it as a ‘preposterous exaggeration of small claims’, and consolidate Clare’s reputation as a major Romantic poet (it’s strange to remember that he was much more successful in his lifetime than Keats, with whom he shared a publisher ...”

“... said. To have in your life a problem play, to have it be a problem play because of your life.As David Mitchell notes in his introduction to this reissue of Medusa’s Ankles, the selected stories are as deep and broad as the three decades they cover, though the ones from Sugar and Other Stories (1987) are the most indispensable. Each is different from the ...”

“... nationalism, as well as his middle-finger politics and his ‘America First’ ranting, comes from David Duke, the former grand wizard of the KKK; from George Wallace, the segregationist governor and former presidential nominee; from Joe McCarthy, who thought America was being overrun by aliens; and from lynch-happy Pat Buchanan, protector of the rights of the ...”

“... her album Butterfly, encouraging her to ditch the showtunes for covers of Bill Withers and David Bowie. He wanted to bring out Streisand’s ‘sexy side’: he told a journalist she had been playing ‘Ray Stark’s mother-in-law’ for too long.Streisand and Peters stayed together for eight years. He sold his salon and made a move on Hollywood, using ...”

“... waving cushions and towels, and some were leaning out. It happened that one of the firefighters, David Badillo, knew two of the uncles, Carlos and Manfred Ruiz, from the sports centre – they had all worked there as lifeguards – and Melanie gave Badillo her keys to their flat, 176 on the 20th floor. (They still hadn’t heard from Jessica.) Badillo went ...”

“... 12 June, the arrows indicated that the German army was twenty miles from Paris. (Not on the map, David and Wallis Windsor leaving France in a convoy of cars loaded with their luggage.) Harriet and Clarencesaw that the illuminations had been switched off in the Cismigiu. The park, where people walked in summer until all hours, was now silent and deserted, a ...”

“... More Cecil Beaton?’ Norman showed her the book he was looking at, this time something on David Hockney. She leafed through it, gazing unperturbed at young men’s bottoms hauled out of Californian swimming-pools or lying together on unmade beds. ‘Some of them,’ she said, ‘some of them don’t seem altogether finished. This one is quite ...”

“... Visions of a postcapitalist future, from Alec Nove’s Economics of Feasible Socialism (1983) to David Schweickart’s After Capitalism (2002), have more often been forms of market socialism. (Schweickart folds ‘a capital assets tax’ much like Piketty’s into a comprehensive transitional programme.) The private accumulation of capital would no longer ...”

“... taking on some of the larger commissions in London, such as Maccreanor Lavington, Patrick Lynch or David Chipperfield, all of whom owe something to the Cambridge School’s concern for urban order, classical tripartite structures, colonnades, brickwork and stone. For them, Brutalism’s rupture with the existing city is a mistake to be rectified. Their ...”