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“... helicopter pilot called Nam the Dam; ‘some kind of crazy salvage-diver-cum-Armada-treasure-hunter’ called Argonaut; drifters like Knifegrinder and DJ Cormorant; Chef Macbeth with his remote-controlled planes; and sinister John Brotherhood, the focus for a series of portentous references to the Devil, and for stories of sexual depravity involving ...”

“... undistracted by ambition. Boorman may be the most inspired and wayward of English directors since Michael Powell.Not that Powell would have attempted Point Blank. Not that anyone in 1967 had reason to think that a young Englishman raised on the leafy edges of south London (Carshalton, and later Shepperton) would know how to go to Los Angeles (and San ...”

“... on the strength of both small donations and generous outlays by billionaires like Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. It got them neither a landslide nor victories in Senate races where they put more than $100 million on the table. The returns were meagre even though polling on the issues consistently reflects a widespread preference for Democratic policies: a ...”

“... some of the medical history that was being published in the Eighties, particularly by Roy Porter. Michael Neve and Jonathan Miller separately suggested that the madness of George III would make a play, and Neve lent me The Royal Malady by Charles Chenevix Trench, which is still the best account of the King’s illness and the so-called Regency Crisis. I also ...”

“... and Healey discovered in 1964 that the two hulls already laid down could have been converted into hunter-killer submarines at no extra cost. This news, however, was withheld from the Cabinet. ‘Wilson wanted to justify continuing the Polaris programme on the grounds that it was “past the point of no return”. I did not demur.’ In a period of ...”

“... prose to celestial poetry. (They hadn’t read, these promoters of the Penman in Hollywood fable, Michael Moorcock’s minatory letters to J.G. Ballard, the grind of lost years and aborted projects.) So, obviously, when I met Penman, this Schrader yarn was the one I put to him. Why did he come back? Where did it all go wrong? The truth was less ...”

“... many of the non-communicable diseases now predominant in the West were uncommon or absent in hunter-gatherers and peasant agriculturists. 2. When these populations change from their traditional ways of life to those of the developed countries, they begin to exhibit the Western pattern of disease. 3. The incidence of some of the diseases has declined in ...”

“... a Republican congressional picnic on the White House lawn.)*In California, Republican Duncan Hunter – the second congressman to endorse Trump for president – claims in television ads and speeches that his Democratic challenger, Ammar Campa-Najjar, is named after Yasser Arafat, and is supported by the Muslim Brotherhood in an attempt by ...”

“... the classical view from above comes near the end of the poem, after the fall, when the archangel Michael shows Adam a series of mostly grim prophetic visions of what lies in store for his descendants. In Milton’s brief epic Paradise Regained Satan shows Jesus the kingdoms of the world as a series of visions from above. Here, unusually, the guide is ...”

“... but certainly for now. It was at this point, however, that (to borrow a metaphor from the late Hunter S. Thompson) the crows came home to roost, accompanied by several giant condors. The law of unintended consequences kicked in, big-time. With Labour remade as a party of the centre right, what were the Tories supposed to be? What space were they supposed ...”

“... early prehistory. Twenty years ago, Alan Smith and other archaeologists proposed that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers would have found an advantage in enlarging and manipulating grassy areas where wild grazing animals gathered, and in encouraging nuts and berries to grow on the edge of the wood or in thickets. It is a tempting notion, given that hazel pollen was ...”

“... confronts the beholder far more boldly. Charles Hope, in his remarkable monograph on Titian, like Michael Jacobs in a brisk and entertaining polemic on the nude in painting, rejects the idea that this is a painting of Venus.1 It represents simply ‘a mortal female lying on a bed’, as Hope puts it, ‘gazing at us with a startlingly direct and unambiguous ...”

“... 1880, had run away from Stonyhurst to South Africa aged 18, and roamed that country thereafter as hunter, policeman, prospector, star rugby player and not unsuccessful part-time politician. In 1914 he led a national recruiting campaign for the Imperial Light Horse, then served with them through the successful South-West Africa campaign. He then took ship for ...”

“... too, that the government will be branded dirigiste; it turns out that he has been primed by Anji Hunter. In common with Prezza, Mullin finds that the garden of his flat is infested. On New Year’s Day 2001, while trying to slash it back with a new electric hedge-trimmer, Mullin slices through the cable, ‘fortunately without fatal consequences’. Given ...”

“... and a voice. The first reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen ...”