“... on Toni Morrison, who – as a photo that recently went viral made clear – hung out with Angela Davis in the early 1970s, and surely Don DeLillo’s speculations on Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra merited attention. There is at least one known case. In 2013 William Vollmann wrote about getting hold of his own FBI file and discovering that during the ...”

“... bed, and then at his right hand when he needed a factotum. Philip Ziegler’s life of Rupert Hart-Davis (2004) was kindly received for perhaps the same reason. ‘I’m not really “au fond” a publisher at all,’ Hart-Davis told a friend. ‘I’m really some sort of literary bloke, who likes ...”

“... think seriously about Red Badge. Crane’s life was so short – he didn’t reach thirty – that Paul Sorrentino, like the rest of Crane’s biographers, focuses on the episodes Crane barely had time to live: harum-scarum education; the writing of Red Badge; stints of war reporting first in Greece, then in Cuba; a couple of years in England, where he made a ...”

“... in an angry report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee about Oflot, a.k.a. Peter Davis, an accountant who regulates the National Lottery. Even in the United States, lottery directors’ annual salaries are restricted to less than £ 100,000. The annual salary of Tim Holley, chief executive of the British lottery company, Camelot, is ...”

“... switch ideas in new directions in response to new conjunctures’. Here, she chimes with Jennifer Davis, whose 2015 study of Charlemagne’s government also emphasises improvisation and bricolage. This leaves open the question of Charlemagne’s motivation. He would prove an abiding model for rulership in medieval Europe, but what was his inspiration? The ...”

“... like a wine sauce, into an ultramontane oddity? Those vexed by the thought should turn to John Davis’s collection of historical essays, Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution.4 It is concerned with aspects of Italy’s failed revolution, in both the 19th and the 20th centuries. Mr Davis’s lucid introduction ...”

“... viewers are more likely to be familiar with the legal plight of the American activist Angela Davis than with what happened in Notting Hill the same year. This may be the reason McQueen, who developed the series over many years, wanted it to be shown on the BBC. Small Axe has a Reithian spirit. The two best episodes, however, ‘Lovers Rock’ and ...”

“... enlisting the help of the city’s gardeners. In the painting Janis Joe from the same year, Angela Davis climbs out of a prison window into a world created by Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker. In another painting, La Comegente, Vicuña becomes a great reclining goddess opening her mouth to eat a queue of bad people and fertilising a new-born city below. (The ...”

“... There are two stories to tell about Paul Robeson – one sad and the other tragic. Both could be constructed from the ample data in this heavy, ill-focused, yet informative concatenation of computerised database, research grant and exclusive access to the subject’s papers. In the first a young Negro of high intelligence, great physical strength and grace, musically talented and gifted with a resonant bass voice, is induced by a dominant white culture to fill various roles – social, professional and indeed dramatic – formulated for blacks to perform ...”

“... So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as someone else. The whole world expands and changes in ‘Cass and Me’ when, as a boy, he climbs on the older Cass’s shoulders, and they lean out                across the yard As a giant would across the world ...”

“... to conduct seminars to his groupies on the Dylan family’s garbage; fervent hagiographers like Paul Williams; politicians (Jimmy Carter was always quoting Dylan when on the stump), rock journalists, music historians, cultural historians, hard-core fanzine-types; and even an English international fast-bowler – Bob ‘Dylan’ Willis changed his name by ...”

“... toilet paper’. In December 2016 the Northern Ireland Executive’s minister for communities, Paul Givan, withdrew funding from an Irish language group which intended to spend the money on children from disadvantaged families. Soon afterwards, Sinn Féin’s deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness, resigned, bringing down the executive; he blamed the ...”

“... and many other standard works of the era get a showing: Mangan’s ‘Dark Rosaleen’, Thomas Davis’s ‘A Nation Once Again’, Ferguson’s ‘Lament for Thomas Davis’, and all. Still, space has been found for somewhat better and less familiar works by Ferguson – ‘At the Polo-Ground’, for instance, a ...”

“... The latter were perhaps the most pious exponents of the ‘one nation’ ideal. Thomas Davis lived the spirit of the United exhortation to think ‘little of our ancestors, much of our posterity’. The finest of their many fine phrases, it was, sadly, among the vainest. The past resisted all efforts to subjugate it to the future. Reality remained ...”

“... Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops on 5 July 1972. It was three years since ‘Space Oddity’ had made it into the top ten after being used by the BBC in its broadcast of the Apollo 11 ...”