“... fear of contradiction (or of lawsuits, at least) that action on Aids issues in New York was held back by Ed Koch, mayor between 1978 and 1989 and a closeted gay man. Elsewhere there’s a little blurring in the novel, and an inconsistent set of conventions in force, whereby Gay Men’s Health Crisis is named but Act-Up (the Aids Coalition to Unleash ...”

“... Robinson organised Cuban solidarity demonstrations, for which he was suspended. He and Blake also held political meetings for Black students, setting the scene for the emergence of Black Studies at the end of the 1960s. The Afro-American Association – a Berkeley student reading group which included Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale – envisioned Black Studies ...”

“... out of the small worlds mapped in Eating people is wrong and The British Museum is falling down. David Lodge’s latest, Paradise News, crosses at least ten time zones from Rummidge, over the Pacific Rim, to Hawaii. Doctor Criminale clocks up fewer frequent-flyer miles, but short-hauls hectically. The narrative opens in London, flies to Vienna, boards the ...”

“... diary might not be quite a classic, but it becomes one in the hands of its exemplary editor David Vaisey, who has trimmed it to not much more than a third of its original length, and richly supplemented its information about the village’s inhabitants and about Turner’s family and business. In this way he quietly helps to substantiate the observation ...”

“... Much has been said about Afghan corruption, and with justification, but many were aggrieved when David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in the country, said that corruption had been part of Afghan culture for ‘however long this country has … been in existence’. Many Afghans dispute this, saying that corruption was manageable under the ...”

“... business: theirs was to pay and obey. Their leaders promised not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms ...”

“... read many of the same books, from the same canon of French revolutionary literature. He respected David as a painter because of his ‘revolutionary classicism’ and, in his book on The Success and Failure of Picasso, he cites Bakunin’s typically anarchist dictum that ‘the urge to destroy is also a creative urge,’ comparing it to Picasso’s ...”

“... living, however eminent. Take Mike Newell, who wanted Rupert to do a bit of work for the role of David Blakely, the guy killed by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England. Newell wanted to see Rupert’s pain. But, as Rupert himself admits, he was ‘a riddle as an actor. On screen, I had a lot of “feeling” but I couldn’t really act. On stage ...”

“... for Russia’, but given that everything gained from the most important source of all, Enigma, was held back, the Russians were always getting far less than half of what we could have told them. (No doubt the same was true in reverse.) This was, of course, a combination of circumstances in which the likes of Kim Philby were likely to thrive. For the two ...”

“... different inquiries took place into the conditions in which he and his fellow prisoners were being held. After the second, it was decided to release the prisoners on condition that they did not return to Ireland. Thus, in January 1871, O’Donovan Rossa arrived in New York; he was greeted as a hero.Among the friends he made in America was Patrick Ford, the ...”

“... genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by ...”

“... someone else back and that’s what neither of them was good at.28 March. Another death, this time David Storey whom I liked and found sympathetic, though I might run into him only occasionally and most often in M&S. It was always cheering, even if these days he was often shuffling as much from the medicines he was taking as from old age. But he would call me ...”

“... detention experience to be Club Med’.*On any given day there are at least 50,000 adults being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centres; at least 20,000 held by Customs and Border Protection, and between 11,000 and 14,000 children under 18 in the custody of the Office of Refugee ...”

“... devil, called Particular Propriety’, stood in shameful contrast to the early Christians who had held all things in common (Acts 2.44). Linklater himself used to believe passionately in Winstanley’s ideals and ‘lived for longer than was sensible on communes in the United States and Europe, farming unproductive, steeply sloping fields locked away in the ...”

“... did his whitened bones glisten in the moonbeams; and as the wind shook the chains which held the body’ – he was enslaved even in death – ‘many a little negro who had strayed that way in search of guavas, fled from the spot, for fear of the “dead man’s jumby”.’A jumby, Flanigan explains, is a vengeful spirit that haunts a place or ...”