“... the poster boy for gang moronics, for self-destructive, incommensurate revenge? According to David Grossman, all Jewish children when they first hear the story learn to call him Samson the Hero. He is wrong about this, but then my Jewish childhood was not in Hebrew or in Israel. I recall the Samson story mainly as an early introduction to the power of ...”

“... individualist and a guilt-ridden crybaby.Before Crumb, no artist had so openly used comics as a means of personal expression. After Crumb, the deluge, starting with the underground cartoonists who followed in the wake of his Zap Comix (1968), a 24-page pamphlet that – according to one of his drawings – Crumb and his first wife, Dana Morgan, sold for a ...”

“... when you set out to look the present in the eye but can’t quite bear the thought? Much of David Marquand’s powerful essay about ‘Britain, now’ is an elegy for a lost past, unsullied by ‘masterless capitalism’, a sad story of the light growing dim, good running to bad, the public realm hollowed out by vested interests, greed and unexamined ...”

“... classes, and where such parties do exist they tend to act less as agents of government than, in David Lehmann’s words, ‘as employment agencies for their followers’. In their place are clientelist, sometimes even semi-feudal, oligarchies whose capacity for survival is remarkable. Despite the revolution of 1910-20, many of the Mexican élites are ...”

“... The moment was late in 1970, at the Travellers’ Club in London, during a supper for 14 people. David Brower, the saint of eco-sanity from the Sierra Club in California, had just given a sermon, a hell-fire variant of the one geologists have used for a century or more: rocks are long, life is short, who do we think we are? Brower’s homily – which the ...”

“... and reproductive capabilities of the communities that remained behind. Africa was transformed. David Livingstone is prominent among the figures credited with ending the slave trade. In fact, pressure for its abolition was already widespread and achieving results before he was born (in 1813) and it had been banned by the governments of the United States and ...”

“... History of Australia, the indispensable one-volume condensation of his magnum opus, is a by no means atypical sentence: ‘The choir sang a Te Deum, which because of the terrible heat wafted fitfully around the arena; the flag of the new commonwealth was hoisted, and the artillery thundered and cheer after cheer ran around the great arena.’ You don’t ...”

“... tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the ...”

“... of the church, the rise of intolerance, the spirit of the Crusades – blame it on Constantine. David Potter punctures this inflated image. This doesn’t mean he cuts Constantine down to size: far from it. Potter has done something far more difficult. He has examined, with gusto and an unrivalled mastery of detail, the aspects of Constantine neglected by ...”

“... at MoMA again (until 14 May). At the time the show opened, Rivera was acknowledged, along with David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, as a leader of Mexican muralism, which was supported by the new government of Alvaro Obregón as a way to promote a transformed sense of Mexican identity through public art. This new identity would yoke an ...”

“... of the Movements for European Unity. Its star was Winston Churchill, out of office but by no means out of ideas or charisma, and now renewing his old attachment to the idea of a federal Europe. In particular Duranti credits Churchill with having ‘removed the tarnish of Axis propaganda from European integration’. The European Movement’s director of ...”

“... wife is suffering a nervous breakdown, nor why he receives messages from well-wishers like ‘the David and Jonathan Society, a newly-formed group of young, caring, Jewish faggots’. Joshua’s mother runs a massage parlour called Oral is Beautiful in Winnipeg which offers bilingual services. This is hardly enlightening. As baffling is the police interest in ...”

“... lets drop the phrase ‘cryptogamic malady’, explaining to her friend that ‘cryptogamia’ means ‘concealed wedlock’. (The reader, of course, quietly makes the application to Florence and Emily themselves.) As for ‘Hermitage’, the name of a Rhône wine, this is a little joke of Florence and Emily’s own: they tell themselves that the chateau ...”

“... poets, or on general topics related to allusion: there are pieces on A.E. Housman, Yvor Winters, David Ferry, plagiarism, metaphor and ‘Loneliness and Poetry’. Ricks has a fine ear, as he knows, and is happiest when demonstrating the unique resources and powers of poetry. His method is essentially evaluative, and it depends on precise ...”

“... Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight. He is probably right to say that he has a better story about Marlowe’s origins in Canterbury and his doings at Corpus in ...”