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“... on Truman Capote’s account of a quadruple murder in rural Kansas, the film was shot in vérité black and white and used the actual locations where the killings took place. But the true crime genre has a much longer lineage. More than four centuries ago a series of plays closely based on real murder cases appeared on the London stage. Their literary quality ...”

“... in Guitar and Mandolin on a Table? Is not Picasso Nietzsche’s painter? ‘Nude on a Black Armchair’ (1932). Focused on half a dozen paintings from the interwar years, Picasso and Truth is suffused throughout with the sombre glory of Nietzsche’s twilight. Eloquent, confrontational and often disarmingly simple, Clark’s writing moves ...”

“... blood never having figured on the Bennett dining table even in its relatively refined form of black pudding. Some food we did consider too lowly to eat, tripe for instance, which was a favourite of my grandma, and chitterlings from the same ‘uggery-buggery pie shop’ down Tong Road in Wortley.Until I started to read the novels and diaries of the ...”

“... inch a mandarin’ – and the political scientist Colin Leys. Qualified praise goes to Christopher Hill; there are fond memories of Tariq Ali (who contests one or two details in the memoir). Johnson remembers Hodgkin, a dogged adversary of Pretoria, refusing to sign a petition in favour of anti-apartheid activists who’d torn up the cricket ground ...”

“... out the Centre’s orders: The directive sent to Guk contained unintentional passages of deep black comedy which revealed terrifying gaps in the Centre’s understanding of Western society in general and Britain in particular. Guk was told that an ‘important sign’ of British preparations for nuclear war would probably be ‘increased purchases of ...”

“... blacksmith an ideal heroic shadow behind his contemporary successor, a representative of the black economy, ‘unpursued by conscience or by priest’: but the poem’s apparent sense of the involvement of economic with moral collapse is not pursued beyond a kind of soured grumble. And ‘The Garden’ opens with a condemnation of what Tomlinson calls ...”

“... a cricket-playing Protestant stockbroker called Adrien who strikes Ellen as a ‘grown-up Christopher Robin’, and his cousin Bobbie. Life seems idyllic until Ellen catches her flat-mate together with the balding and maladroit Bobbie. Insane with jealousy, Ellen attacks Myra with the bread-knife and kills her, making it look, however, as if the ...”

“... are everything to them. It is gross, but also comically inept: ‘I look in the mirror. Silvered black hair; gray lizardskin shoes’ – it’s a jigsaw of a Whistler speaking, not a person! Once he has put the pieces together, they proclaim: I am, like my mother, a broad-shouldered, slim-waisted woman with strong thighs; neither small-breasted nor ...”

“... is a send-up. There’s an infuriating frivolity, cynicism and finally a vacuousness.’ Christopher Booker: ‘Peter Cook once said, back in the 1960s, “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea,” and I think we really are doing that now.’The key word here is ‘giggling’ (or in some versions of the ...”

“... to a simple rule that determines their sequence in a given line by assessing the colour – black or white – of neighbouring cells in the previous line. The pattern is left to evolve through iteration of the rule. An astronomically large set of such rules can be defined, and Wolfram charted the behaviour of as many of them as he could. Despite their ...”

“... Beast’ herself, doing a photo-shoot for David Bailey, ‘sprawling with her legs wide apart, her black satin crotch glinting between her scrawny 55-year-old thighs’. Melvyn Bragg, filming his reaction shots for the South Bank Show, ‘smiling, simpering, giggling, looking down at his nails’. Richard Harris at the Savoy in 1990, ‘playing pocket ...”

“... laid on a grand night-time tour that climaxed in a visit to the Colosseum, which – according to Christopher Woodward in his excellent In Ruins – ‘was lit from inside by red lamps so that, as if ablaze, it cast a bloody glow on to the grass and the ruddy brick ruins on the surrounding slopes.’* Descanting to Albert Speer, his pet pseudo-classical ...”

“... is a shame, on the other hand, that the exciting theoretical work of complexity theorists such as Christopher Langton, Don Farmer and Stuart Kauffman was not incorporated into Keller’s synthesis. It’s clear that genes have a very real physical and chemical existence, and that the ‘gene kit’ and associated DNA regulatory components of a given species ...”

“... among them are posters of Rashid Ladoja, the sitting governor of Oyo State, and of his deputy, Christopher Alao-Akala, who is also running for governor. A little over a year ago Ladoja was impeached on trumped-up charges by a handful of members of the state assembly backed by a gang of armed militia; Akala assumed his place while Ladoja’s appeal wound ...”

“... to a metaphysical belief system that maps onto a culture’s history and ethics. But, to borrow Christopher Warnes’s contrast between ontology and irreverence in his Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel,* the approach of contemporary retellers of myths, including Ugrešić, makes clear that the readers they have in mind aren’t concerned with ...”