“... that Martin Luther King Jr was murdered on a hotel balcony in the west of the city. Five foot two, green-eyed, a self-described ‘gypsy-spirited tyrannical pirate’ with a face that was equal parts Old Hollywood and Brancusi mask, Lisa Marie was famous for her relationships with Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage – and for being Elvis’s daughter. Before ...”

“... David Gibson was a man stiff and parsonical; by all accounts the sort of man who got things done. You could say he was obsessed with ridding Glasgow of its slums, with turning them into something bright and high and unquestionably modern. That’s what he wanted, and he’d already made vast advances towards getting it when he became convener of Glasgow Corporation’s housing committee in 1964 ...”

“... gardens or satellite dishes. The other houses, still painted in leprous pastel colours, pink, green, yellow or blue, and covered in graffiti, have been stripped bare: the ex-inhabitants have taken everything – the doors, the windows, the sinks, the toilets, the sockets. ‘If they could take the house away they would,’ a PM headline blares. The cement ...”

“... being the buzzword for the shearing off of voter-unfriendly associations. Before David Cameron, or ‘DC’, as he’s known, took over in December 2005, Conservative strategists had noted anxiously that focus groups would turn against almost anything – even, or especially, tax cuts – as soon as they were told it was Tory ...”

“... the landmarks of Marxian economic thinking include Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972), David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi’s Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual quakes of capitalist crisis. Yet little trace ...”

“... a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of ...”

“... at the group closely in 1997, after some of them contributed to Against Nature, the notorious anti-Green television documentary; over the years he has called them ‘industry lobbyists’, ‘a bizarre and cultish network’, ‘an obscure and cranky sect’. ‘Invasion of the Entryists’, originally published in the Guardian in 2003 but better read in the ...”

“... her and forced her into his car. Its remit has now been expanded: it will also look at how David Carrick, nicknamed ‘Bastard Dave’ by his colleagues in the Met, raped and sexually assaulted at least twelve women over a period of seventeen years without being prosecuted. The Casey report into ‘standards and culture’ at the Met, prompted by the ...”

“... dismissed him as ‘spit in the horrible communitarian soup’ and one of his former acolytes, David Watson, wrote a book, Beyond Bookchin, ridiculing him. Bookchin replied to Öcalan that he was too ill to correspond with him. Öcalan wasn’t put off. He believed Bookchin’s work showed a way for failed national-liberation struggles to transform ...”

“... still looks unnervingly bold.) I vaguely recall one all-night event at (I think) Screen on the Green, which mixed rad new post-punk bands with Herzog films. (Memo to my younger self: really not a good idea to take amphetamines before going to see 16-rpm directors like Herzog and Tarkovsky.) Artists like Fassbinder and Kiefer also aimed for something like ...”

“... having read Auden’s City Without Walls, Grigson wrote an Epistle in which he excelled himself: Green pillows of cress In the brook which begins us You celebrate too; And up from your verses, Though many Forget them, stinking Ogres not read them, Blest by high priests Stiff generals not Stoop to reject them, Rises an odour Of essence, I say, of Ripeness and ...”

“... fringe groups. At the culmination of his triumphant visit to the UK last month, Modi, addressing David and a sari-clad Samantha Cameron and a 60,000-strong audience at Wembley Stadium, mentioned, in order to earn multicultural brownie points, one of the icons of the bhakti movement, Kabir, a Muslim weaver’s son, unmindful of Kabir’s distaste for bogus ...”

“... has come to a head faster than expected as a result of the Scottish independence referendum and David Cameron’s political ambition. Labour has (or had) an electoral interest in keeping Scotland in the Union. The Conservatives do not. Their loyalty to the United Kingdom is sentimental, not electoral. The practical argument against Scottish independence was ...”

“... hardwood trees and African smallholdings. Out here it’s the same old Natal I knew as a boy, a green, untidy place where everything grows too easily and where you have to watch out for snakes, a world through which bare-footed Africans trek vast distances along dusty roads. Just fifty miles from Durban you find a patient acceptance of hardship which, to ...”

“... for American Negroes, to read of hotels in Boston and San Francisco, as well as Akron, Ohio and Green Bay, Wisconsin, refusing him service because of his colour. Even the august Savoy Grill denied him entry in 1929, though it had allowed him in before. Not ignorant prejudice, apparently, but canny shopkeeping lay behind that decision. American tourists were ...”