“... officer, gunner of the Caesar. In 1809 he was taken prisoner at the Basque Roads action. Joshua Davis was an earlier naval prisoner, an American who in 1778 was taken by the frigate Surprise aboard the Jason of Boston, a rebel privateer. He changed sides several times after his capture. He describes himself as ‘an American citizen who was pressed and ...”

“... There’s a scene in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in which John Travolta’s character, a hitman called Vincent Vega, who has escorted his boss’s wife home after an evening out, returns from the bathroom to find her unconscious on the floor. Mia (Uma Thurman) has taken a bag of heroin from his jacket pocket and, mistaking the white powder for cocaine, snorted a line and collapsed ...”

“... Buckingham Palace. Compiled by Philip’s now retired private secretary, Brigadier Sir Miles Hunt-Davis (or, as the Tannese, with their love of malapropism, rendered it, Big Ass Dear Summer Lance Daisies), the papers included retellings of the cult’s foundational myths. As the villagers sat round a fire drinking kava, Baylis reluctantly found himself ...”

“... member of the Vibrators she married) and Barry Reynolds. They worked together on a cover of John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’ and a wild setting of the poet Heathcote Williams’s ‘Why D’Ya Do It’, which was so full of expletives that the pressing plant and distributors initially refused to handle it. It was that track, and the title ...”

“... portraits of the Thirties (and, if there were more space, a related de Kooning and ideally a John Graham too, but at all events one such Gorky). Rosenthal’s view was that ‘in no way’ could such a painting be ‘described as one of the most central works of 20th-century American art. Gorky’s significance was to come later, in the last few years of ...”

“... and Lawrence Urdang move from one dictionary house to another. Oxford (with R.W. Burchfield and John Sykes) is comparatively stable. When work began on the new Collins, Paul Procter and Della Summers were young conductors under impresario Urdang, and they later moved on to make dictionaries for Longman. Patrick Hanks was recruited to complete the Collins ...”

“... UK’s forced departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in September 1992 had condemned John Major’s government to nearly five years of public disintegration, years in which the party’s anti-European ‘bastards’, as Major described them, reacted to the abrupt end of belief in Tory competence by doing their best to scupper his ...”

“... Ravilious. Friend’s previous books have included splashy illustrated tomes on Ravilious and on John Nash, but here he turns from figurative British artists in love with British tradition towards figurative British artists who wanted to destroy it. An exhibition of AIA work, also called Comrades in Art: Artists against Fascism, is being held at the Towner ...”

“... The first volume of John Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1955, starts: When I try to remember where my education in poetry began, the first image that comes to mind is that of my father’s library at the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp ...”

“... apotheosis in the 1970s. Gravity’s Rainbow won the National Book Award; Jean-Luc Godard, Miles Davis, Ingmar Bergman, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin et al. were interviewed on national television. For a few years, it seemed as if Harrison would be one of the great beneficiaries of this moment.In the first half of the 1960s he worked on several films with ...”

“... repeating his classic 1936 role, Henry Fonda doing Leslie Howard, and Lauren Bacall as Bette Davis. The show went well. Bogart, always a bit of a snob, and once chucked out of Andover, was impressed that Dunne had been to Williams College. He invited the nobody kid to a party at his home in the Holmby Hills. Dunne knew he was out of his element ...”

“... certain version of ‘Autumn Leaves’ in the soundtrack, he could probably have been called Ralph Davis – and is marvellously played by Jeffrey Wright, who keeps us at a distance while inviting us to become his allies. And then disinvites us while still wanting us to feel sorry for him. Late in the film his girlfriend Coraline (Erika Alexander), whom he ...”

“... Across the start of Eastward Hoe, the very funny city comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, she wrote ‘prity one’, then crossed it out, substituting: ‘a resnabell prity one’.In her will Wolfreston bequeathed her books to her son Stanford, on the condition that ‘he shall carefully keepe them together,’ which he seems to have ...”

“... It’s been two years since the last one, so it must be time for a new book of poems by John Ashbery. Like the old James Bond films, Ashbery’s late instalments arrive punctually, and you buy your ticket knowing what to expect: a suave cartoon with ridiculous gadgets, clever one-liners and last-minute escapes. ‘So Long, Santa’, the penultimate poem in Ashbery’s previous collection, A Worldly Country (2007), worried that ‘it will come round again/and we won’t be ready ...”

“... Communist influence there, acquiring personal and institutional backing, and marrying Nancy Davis. This reassemblage of the actor/politician made him whole – the cause he supported and the people who supported him constituting the rest of Ronald Reagan. Dismembered as personal body on film, Ronald Reagan was reassembled as social body, as ...”