“... to its dancefloor, where everybody was doing the Twist. Tennessee Williams, Merle Oberon and Noël Coward were regulars. Norman Mailer did the Twist with Lord Beaverbrook’s granddaughter. High society enjoyed slumming it, and the socialites, sailors and salesmen sweated it out together in the noisy gloom, posing, cruising, ogling. Press fascination with the ...”

“... become Pottery Lane is the only identifiable landmark. The studio of the photographer played by David Hemmings in Antonioni’s Blow-Up is on Pottery Lane. The Grove sweeps down into Notting Dale, and passes several of the large communal gardens that are a feature of the Ladbroke Estate, and which appear in the novels of Alan Hollinghurst. People tell me ...”

“... The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.22 February. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court, to jeer as the vans carrying the two ten-year-olds accused of the toddler’s murder are driven away. One man eludes the ...”

“... a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...”

“... then, that the two finest biographies of Fanon have been written by an Englishman and an American. David Macey’s Frantz Fanon: A Biography was published in 2000: it is the kind of book that has always (justifiably) attracted the epithet ‘magisterial’. Macey’s account is now joined by The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz: necessarily a more ...”

“... particularly on chat shows – got wilder and longer so that one had the nauseating spectacle of David Frost, for instance, standing supposedly touched and surprised by the audience’s unexpected warmth, the shouts of the PAs now become whoops. This quickly became standard and a customary feature of live shows today, particularly Graham Norton’s, with the ...”

“... on the mainland, and also unwilling to compete with other writers. His English biographer David Gilmour suspects that he was moved to write by his sense that as an ‘ultimate descendant of an ancient noble line whose economic and physical extinction culminated in himself’, he would be the last member of his family to have ‘vital memories’, or ...”

“... that would make up his second collection, North of Boston (1914); he approached a publishing firm, David Nutt, as represented by Mrs M.L. Nutt, ‘a woman dressed all in black, as if she had just risen from the sea’, who bought the first book and an option to publish the next four.Through the Imagist F.S. Flint, he secured an introduction to Pound, who did ...”

“... families. This budget helps hardworking people keep more of the money they have earned. His boss, David Cameron, criticising Labour in Parliament last month: They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain. The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hardworking taxpayers. The former Conservative ...”

“... Rothermere and his wife in the spring of 1949, Princess Margaret took the microphone from Noël Coward and tried to sing ‘Let’s Do It’, only to be greeted by ‘a prolonged and thunderous booing’ from one of the guests. Caroline Blackwood, ‘enthralled’ by the interruption, asked the man next to her who had caused it. ‘It was that dreadful ...”

“... him blind. One other scene stands out. The hero, Harry Faversham (John Clements), fears he is a coward and having declined to go with his regiment to the Sudan goes native in order to prove himself by working unrecognised to assist his ex-colleagues who have sent him the feathers. To corroborate his disguise as a harmless native he has himself branded, the ...”

“... siblings of Paul Gosar, Republican congressman from Arizona, endorse his Democratic opponent, Dr David Brill. In response, Gosar tweets: ‘Like leftists everywhere, they put political ideology before family. Stalin would be proud.’ (Gosar, a former dentist, is notable for his belief that neo-Nazi groups are funded by George Soros, a Jewish Holocaust ...”

“... 100 Agents of Change’ in the waste debate. Standing at number 28 – one above new entrant David Miliband, the environment secretary – is a man called Andy Moore, who is head of the Community Recycling Network. The first time I met him, in the bar at Paddington Station, he seemed weary but refreshingly non-morose when it came to talking about ...”

“... Chester Kallmann can be understood in this context, or the relationship between James Merrill and David Jackson. This, more likely, was the stamp and seal of the love between Wilde and Douglas. In the years which followed their meeting we get two versions of Wilde’s feelings for Douglas. In July 1894, he wrote: ‘It is really absurd. I can’t live without ...”

“... waving cushions and towels, and some were leaning out. It happened that one of the firefighters, David Badillo, knew two of the uncles, Carlos and Manfred Ruiz, from the sports centre – they had all worked there as lifeguards – and Melanie gave Badillo her keys to their flat, 176 on the 20th floor. (They still hadn’t heard from Jessica.) Badillo went ...”