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“... an ambulance already here, a police car and what looks like a body bag. We wait, and as we wait a herd of cows in a field overlooking the road slowly lines up and observes the scene.10 September. I must be one of the very few of the late queen’s subjects to have said – or almost said – the word ‘erection’ in her presence. It was in 1961 in ...”

“... one of several great X-Files actors born in Dallas, presumably as part of a supernaturally branded herd. (Jerry Hardin, or Deep Throat, as he was called in the show, was another.) Duane Barry is frightened like an animal. His eyes roll and his skull is like a horse’s skull. The scar over his right eye is like a topographical ridge. The actor, who studied ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... early 1920s he and Lawrence planned their very own Boy’s Own adventure, Oxford-style: to drive a herd of deer from Magdalen into All Souls, where Lawrence was a fellow. In the event Lawrence contented himself with ringing a bell in college in the middle of the day, since All Souls ‘needs waking up’. Graves and Nancy tried to support themselves while he ...”

“... Israeli officials, for a man detained as a suspect in the killings of two Palestinians. The man, David Axelrod, is not related to Leon Trotsky. A man with the same name, who is a descendant of Trotsky, was questioned briefly by the police in a case of mistaken identity. The arcane character of this item, which was at the top of that day’s menu, might make ...”

“... clear evidence to the contrary, that the government’s original policy was the unlovely ‘herd immunity’; Dominic Cummings’s unauthorised and unwarranted trip to Durham and his retrofitting of his blog on the night he returned to show that he had prophesied the dangers of a coronavirus all along; and so on, ad nauseam.It has been painful to watch ...”

“... doing business. ‘Come on, vamos, let’s go.’ Every day a new waterfall to climb, an alpaca herd to glimpse on the bleak horizon, a cave to inspect, an animal market with slaughter tables and sacks of wriggling piglets to admire, a weavers’ shed with ponchos to buy. Another bag of coca leaves. Another lunch of glazed guinea pig in peanut-butter ...”

“... cowboy, and takes his role very seriously. Only the other day he was talking about ‘riding herd’ with the Middle East peace process. Bush made Wild West philosophy a central plank of his 2000 election platform. In a documentary made by Alexandra Pelosi,2 we were able to see him spreading his most important message – the right way to wear a pair of ...”

“... on university duties than he had to, and always put a large distance between himself and the herd mentalities that pervade the academic world. The only contemporary with whom he felt thorough intellectual fellowship was Benedetto Croce, the free-spirited Italian journalist, philosopher and politician whose works he began to read while still a ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... lithe, an inspired mimic. Everyone who met him, even those who disliked him, felt his vitality. David ‘Bunny’ Garnett noticed his ‘beautiful lively, blue eyes’, and that he was ‘very light in his movements’. He also maintained that Lawrence’s hair colour, or non-colour – it was reddish-fair – was characteristically working-class. When a ...”

“... adjuncts nursed disdain for the vulgarities of the popular press and popular culture, and for the herd mentality of middlebrow taste with its occasional stampedes. So when Sontag sprung ‘Notes on “Camp”’ in the 1964 fall issue, it rattled the intellectual establishment from within even as it triggered rolling thunder without. I have a copy of that ...”

“... selection of speakers, who ranged from Patrick Heron to Victor Burgin, Mary Kelly to Robyn Denny, David Hockney to Rasheed Araeen. The highlights included Lisa Tickner’s brilliant dismemberment of Reg Butler’s defence of his question: ‘Can a woman become a vital creative artist without ceasing to be a woman except for purposes of census?’ Peter ...”

“... Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset ...”

“... finding the plans already in place, had authorised the invasion of Cuba. There would now be a herd of revisionist historians and propagandists, all assuring us that if he had lived, ‘Jack’ would never have allowed the CIA and the Joint Chiefs to do anything so barbarous and stupid. Why, just the night before he fell to an assassin, he was ...”