“... a distance of more than thirty miles. I’d done this walk by daylight, a clockwise tramp with Andrew Kötting, filmmaker and unstoppable performer. Shortly after we’d completed our blistering marathon, Kötting was returning to his home in St Leonards-on-Sea when he was sideswiped, thrown from his motorbike on the Old Kent Road. He came close to losing ...”

“... A recent episode in a jobbing writer’s life found me interviewing Carolyn Cassady (author of Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg) in her comprehensively occupied Belsize Park flat. The unreality of this situation – talking, shoulder to shoulder, with one of the Beat Generation’s best-preserved icons – was ameliorated by the fact that our paths had crossed a number of times over the last fifteen years ...”

“... his Lincoln green beanie pulled right down, his hipstermonk beard, explained that his partner, Andrew, was the official guardian of the building. He had lived here now for a year and eight months. He was interested in photography and performance – and, in the wake of the recent excavation, history. The four-day removal of Hackney earth led the collective ...”

“... of Calvin in the cartoon Calvin and Hobbes: bigger than his parents and named after himself (as Andrew Carnegie named the Diplodocus Carnegii). As for the other gender, some little girls allegedly find cuddly dinos to love and mother – while others, I suspect, identify with them as big and fierce, or are too busy preparing for their law school entrance ...”

“... Leavitt’s analysis can be painfully self-regarding, but it furnishes anguish with meaning. Andrew explains to Celia later on: ‘Growing up a fag is a strange thing. You never learn about boys’ bodies because you’re afraid of what you will feel and you never learn about girls’ bodies because you’re afraid of what you won’t feel.’ If ...”

“... From the 1820s, ‘Jacksonian democracy’ and ‘Jacksonian nationalism’, named after President Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, united the (white) South and West, and some newly arrived immigrants, in hostility to the North-East. A strong strain of ‘producerist’ ideology was linked to a bitter hostility to ‘parasitical’ elements of society ...”

“... mannerisms that characterise ‘mezzo-Hemingways’ and Woolf’s ‘weaker sisters’, while May Sinclair is chastised for turning out books ‘with one hand tied behind her and a buttered crumpet in the other’. The one genre in which Parker didn’t complain about duplication, on either the stage or the page, was crime. She confessed herself ‘a ...”

“... birthday in 2012 drew contributions from all the paladins of the Tory right: Roger Scruton, Andrew Roberts, Simon Heffer, Iain Duncan Smith. His stream of long, considered speeches continued to ripple through Tory minds, all the more perhaps because they were now running underground. During his wilderness years Powell became the Baptist of the Brexit ...”

“... highly educated adults. This was only to repeat the view of Senator Buzz Windrip, the anti-hero of Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here (1935), that ‘it is not fair to ordinary folks – it just confuses them – to make them try to swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people.’How Trump Thinks was published in ...”

“... still not been implemented. The review into mental health provision at Polmont was led by Wendy Sinclair-Gieben, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for Scotland. One of its key recommendations was a suicide prevention strategy for young people. The Scottish Prison Service dismissed the idea, opting instead to carry out an overarching review of Talk to Me. The ...”