“... can only see so far: the maps give you an idea of what happened further off towards the horizon.David Bomberg was a fire-watcher in Kensington for much of the war, and was inspired by Piranesi’s etchings of the ruins of ancient Rome as he set about his charcoal drawings of London in 1944 and 1945. Nothing came of the topographical book he hoped to publish ...”

“... Early in​ 1971, Robert Hughes, recently appointed as Time magazine’s chief art critic, was ripping out his loft apartment at 143 Prince Street when he received an unexpected visitor. This was Henry Geldzahler, curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum. Hughes, probably the most macho and combative critic in his profession, was, by his own account, sweaty, foul-tempered, sore-footed and ‘grey with ingrained dirt ...”

“... of cuisine and literacy. The photograph-poem has become an important sub-genre. Larkin, Hughes, Porter and others have practised it. There’s a sense in which the photograph does part of the poet’s work for him, freezing a charged but vanishing moment so that nuances of mood or relationship, by definition volatile, become permanently fixed for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and family life, on which the settlement’s ‘blueprint for growth’ was premised. By contrast, David Neal’s monograph opens with a successful legal action brought by a convict couple against one of the First Fleet captains. Neal is concerned to show how the establishment of the rule of law in a penal colony, at once a tautology and an oxymoron, created ...”

“... sextet playing Sidney Bechet and Bix Beiderbecke and a stentorian reading from Ecclesiastes by Ted Hughes. Jill Balcon read a selection of Larkin’s verse, including ‘Church Going’. I couldn’t recall whether any mention was made of Larkin’s fear of death and his certainty that it meant oblivion, but the order of service, available in the abbey’s ...”

“... a habit of dropping his trousers and removing his clothes when provoked and, famously, peeing on David O. Selznick’s carpet (in the middle of a meeting about a film version of A Doll’s House). He was articulate and rude to journalists, which also generated copy. ‘Booze, broads, all true,’ he told hacks. ‘Make up some more if you want to.’ Mitchum ...”

“... tutor-organiser for Durham, to tell her if she’d ever be a writer, I asked her and her husband David to dinner when I was sitting in the North-East and exposed my dilettantish flank by letting slip that I was barely halfway through Regeneration. Even so we have remained friends. Coming to Devon in the winter of 1998 on my last-ever circuit, I wrote to ask ...”

“... can be sure Heaney and Longley thought Olson no great thing. Even less expected is a postcard to David Hammond, a singer and TV director and one of Heaney’s closest friends, sent during a stay in California in 1976. The card apparently shows a muscular man h0lding a club and wearing a leopard-skin loincloth; the message on the reverse, readable by any of ...”

“... Expeditionary Force and the provision of rifles. Connaught took a particularly dim view of Sir Sam Hughes, the maverick Minister of Militia, the full extent of whose devious and corrupt activities is here revealed for the first time. But his relations with the Conservative Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden, were mostly cordial, his term of office was generally ...”

“... activity; and his most recent full-length opera, Gawain, has an ambitious verse libretto by David Harsent. Ted Hughes once wrote a libretto for Gordon Crosse. The Story of Vasco, whose subject-matter involves crows, is an interesting opera by a composer who has now, regrettably, stopped composing. The poet John ...”

“... the Communist Party as a career move: ‘You will meet big people.’ By the end of that year, David Platt, the Daily Worker’s movie reviewer (a witness frequently summoned by Hoberman for counterpoint), announced that ‘never before in the history of the screen have there been so many forward-looking people in positions of responsibility as in ...”

“... Ellison like to make lists of the amazing prodigies that flowed to him from his single novel. David Remnick, writing in the New Yorker in 1994, noted the ‘National Book Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, a place in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a position at New York University as ...”

“... of the social group who form Bobbie Ann Mason’s subject, the Vietnam veterans. Samantha Hughes, the central figure of In Country, ought to have grown up on a farm. Instead, her father enlisted in the Army and was blown to pieces in Vietnam in 1966. (Most of the names on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington are, we are told, ‘country boy ...”

“... he was back in Washington was that he had a judge in mind to perform the task. Her name was Sarah Hughes, a long-time Johnson ally from Dallas whom he had nominated as a federal district judge in 1961, at the start of his vice-presidency. As a Texas appointment he had assumed this was in his gift. But the Justice Department (Bobby’s fiefdom) had told him ...”