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“... introduction to All What Jazz (1970), a collection of mainly unimpressed reviews of John Coltrane, Miles Davis et al that initially appeared in the Telegraph. ‘Sometimes I imagine them,’ he muses of the readers of his monthly column,sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year-old detached houses among the golf ...”

“... in reverse order and told in reverse chronology. He casts the affair between Juliette Gréco and Miles Davis as a film script, while his account of the ‘events’ of 1968 is laid out as a parody of a sociology textbook, with questions and answers at the end of sections. Some of these techniques work better than others; and there is a tendency to ...”

“... pursuit of a ‘militant geography’ larger and grander than the mere search for knowledge. Wade Davis’s book on the British Everest expeditions of 1921, 1922 and 1924 shows how each demonstrated its own form of militant geography, its own blend of poetry and politics, error and achievement. Mallory occupies the centre of this story, but the book reaches ...”

“... a quixotic canard then became a surrealist juggernaut, culminating in the ousting of Governor Gray Davis and the risible election of Arnold Schwarzenegger, action figure, as the custodian of the world’s fifth largest economy. Like Schwarzenegger, Congressman Issa has a piquant history. In the early 1980s, his car-alarm company, which did work for a much ...”

“... of creative destruction, refusing to let any obstacle block its path? Thomas Bender and Mike Davis are two of America’s leading urban scholars. Bender is a cultural historian known for his accounts of the intellectual and aesthetic life of US cities, and for tracing the distinctively metropolitan influences on American arts, letters and politics. He ...”

“... of mules and camels and 44 elephants in India, and shipped them to the Red Sea. After marching 780 miles overland to Tewodros’s capital, he defeated the imperial army (with the loss of two British soldiers) and burned Magdala to the ground. Tewodros committed suicide, and Napier, his job done (at the cost of £9 million to the British taxpayer), marched back ...”

“... native Todd County, Kentucky, to attend ceremonies in honor of another native son – Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, whose United States citizenship had just been restored, ninety years after his death, by a special act of Congress.’ The scene is set for a fine old feast of Southern Nostalgia, a versatile literary property whose ...”

“... that momentary delusion that we are going somewhere. At the end of an evening with friends, the Miles Davis track ‘Mood’ can seem to bind the good things together. The sound of a Bach organ prelude thundering up the stairwell on a bright Sunday morning stirs us, as we brush our teeth, with the feeling that life might, after all, be rather grand.We ...”

“... York subway,’ she writes in a note to ‘The Night Has a Thousand Eyes’: ‘I conjure Crane, Miles Davis, Muriel Rukeyser, Julia de Burgos and Paul Goodman, or their descendants.’ Poems are dedicated to René Char and Tina Modotti. On the page the poems are mosaics of quotes, all the voices running to and from each other (the poetic ...”

“... to the passage, which he called Frobisher’s Straits; in fact he had penetrated a hundred miles or so into an inlet on Baffin Island now known as Frobisher Bay. But he also appeared to have found something even better: a gold mine. He led another expedition the following year and returned to England with 200 tonnes of ore that his men had ‘dug out ...”

“... about such technological history, one may be surprised, too, to find that Sassoon’s car did 50 miles to the gallon. Of somewhat wider historical interest is the fact – which everyone knows in general but which it is more difficult to imagine concretely – that one could then quite unremarkably drive from door to door in Central London and park one’s ...”

“... so LPs on display. ‘Electric jazz,’ whispered Logan, in a sort of trance. ‘Look, there’s Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew! In Calcutta ...’ Gokhale, who clearly didn’t understand this astonishment of Logan’s, asked politely about this Mr Miles Davis. He stared in great surprise at the bright and ...”

“... taking non-consensual photographs of women. Alarm bells ring, or should do, when he calls Betty Davis ‘Miles Davis’s first wife’. Nell is a recent Trinity graduate, living in a grim Dublin houseshare and making money writing blogs about luxury holidays she’s never been on (‘Ngunwi beach, famed for its ...”

“... land borders with the European Union. (The other surrounds Ceuta, also a Spanish territory, 270 miles to the west along the Mediterranean coast.) Landlords and hotels in Nador, which is eight miles south of Melilla, refused to rent rooms to the migrants, so they camped on the slopes of Mount Gurugu, just outside ...”

“... an aunt. Only when her mother married again, this time to a rightwing Chicago surgeon called Loyal Davis, was Nancy able to begin the climb out of her unsatisfactory origins. She dropped her real father and got Davis to adopt her. She began to lose her puppy fat. And she enrolled in Smith College – like all the so-called ...”