“... good and evil effects of missions. The ‘literature’ of this theatre is the preoccupation of Neil Rennie’s Far-Fetched Facts. It takes him down awell-worn and, as he seesit, narrow path. Bernard Smith showed the way in two magnificent books, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850 (1960) and Imagining the Pacific (1992) – from some oversight ...”

“... And many once proud-quivered loins did melt In blood from stinging whip; with hollow eyes Many all day in dazzling river stood To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood. ‘Why were they proud. Why in the name of glory were they proud?’ Keats demanded of the dazzling trio. That it might be wrong that so many human beings should suffer in order that ...”

“... meat: ‘She killed the birds and hooked them by their necks, into the rope around her waist. One day . . . the rope broke’ and she ‘fell into the sea, where, because of the number of fowls hanging from the rope around her waist, she did not sink, but floated out to sea watched by her husband, who could do nothing to help her.’ How weirdly ...”

“... Away’. The title is sharply ironic when we recall that it was her mother’s death, in what Neil Astley calls a ‘freak accident’ in 1968, that precipitated Tonks’s own turn towards spiritualism. The poem echoes, to different and clearly parodic effect, the Dylan Thomas of ‘Fern Hill’: ‘In the green rags of the Bible I tore up/The straight ...”

“... intellectual dominance. He was a ‘genius’ at mental arithmetic. At lunch at Los Alamos one day he challenged the table to a competition. He would mentally solve in 60 seconds, to within 10 per cent accuracy, any problem that could be stated in ten seconds. He cracked such puzzlers as ‘Find the tenth coefficient in the expansion of the binomial ...”

“... atmosphere of overheated desperation so well, or so affectionately, as François Truffaut’s Day for Night. As a double-edged reminder that it is on the director’s broad shoulders that the success of the enterprise ultimately rests, and that it is only in his head that the complete formula is held, Truffaut cast himself as the abstracted but notably ...”

“... the costs of regulation. The desire to control this kind of lobbying goes back at least to the Neil Hamilton ‘cash for questions’ scandal in the 1990s. Hamilton, a Tory minister (for deregulation) with bracingly right-wing views (pro-hanging, anti-NHS, anti-EU, anti-immigrants, with a whiff of anti-Semitism), took brown envelopes full of cash from a PR ...”

“... new director of the British Museum, that the person ideally suited to front the Remain campaign is Neil MacGregor, much loved, with a TV and radio profile and a charismatic speaker. It won’t happen, of course, and in this morning’s Guardian the name of the Duke of Edinburgh is put forward to spearhead the campaign. It’s only in the middle of the ...”

“... and trails a ‘sickly haze of pot smoke’. The fact that hippies are – like the superannuated Neil in The Young Ones – no longer the force they were does not pacify Holbrook. The poison is still coursing deep in England’s veins. McInerney (who was five years old in 1960) is the leading connoisseur with Bret Easton Ellis (who was not born in 1960) of a ...”

“... of both the BBC and ITV to double the ordinary length of their evening news broadcasts on the day of his death could be put down to the social democratish inclinations of the programmers, but the speed with which the coverage had to be assembled suggests that it was more instinctive. Furthermore, the reaction of the press wasn’t very different. All the ...”

“... though it is, is based on a Swiss manuscript edited not long ago by Reeve’s collaborator Neil Wright, but curtly dismissed by Reeve as corrupt in more than a thousand places. Its joint dedication to King Stephen and Robert of Gloucester, which Faletra regards as ‘savvy marketing’ by Geoffrey, is likewise dismissed as a ‘clumsy adjustment’ of ...”

“... have I done?” is one that we may well ask ourselves,’ Chomsky wrote, ‘as we read each day of fresh atrocities in Vietnam – as we create, or mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be used to justify the next defence of freedom.’ Chomsky’s route to this position began with his reaction against the conformist culture of Penn. Searching for ...”

“... compliance. When Ronald Reagan appointed Anne Gorsuch (mother of the newest Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch) to head the EPA, he asked if she was willing to ‘bring it to its knees’. She slashed its budget and, as the New York Times put it, ‘sabotaged the agency’s enforcement effort’. In response, James Thornton, a crusading lawyer, brought ...”

“... not only disastrously divided but exceptionally feeble. One needn’t be quite as scathing about Neil Kinnock as R.W. Johnson has recently been in these columns in order to agree with him that the idea of Kinnock at No 10 is disturbingly like the idea of Jesse Jackson in the White House. And one needn’t put too much weight on Peter Jenkins’s account of ...”

“... took over four hundred thousand words to chronicle – an average of around five hundred words a day; but since some days apparently only merited a few lines and others none at all, this means that it was not uncommon for a day to receive a thousand or even fifteen hundred words of description. In a way this is fair ...”