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“... their majority in the Senate and might even increase it if Raphael Warnock prevails over Herschel Walker, a Republican former football star, in the Georgia run-off on 6 December. (That Walker is regarded as a plausible candidate is one of the strange fruits of the Trump era.) The Senate majority will be indispensable to ...”

“... character in Apocalypse Now mournfully observes; but one sometimes wonders. In Out of the Sixties David Wyatt argues that Vietnam remains ‘the defining thing, our war, our story’, and he compares it to an iceberg, ‘a mostly submerged history that cruises through our dreams’. Oddly though, he in the end makes very few connections between the work of ...”

“... pleasure that remains to me: I indulge in reading about movies with undiminished enthusiasm. David Thomson has written about his disappointment with contemporary cinema, about how the franchise movie and the blockbuster are killing Hollywood and his hopes, and because I am one of the legion of Thomson’s devoted fans, it cheers me up to hear it. If he ...”

“... man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated slavery, the pragmatic politician ...”

“... or immerse himself in it for too long, setting out on long walks and trips alone, as his alter ego David Copperfield does in moments of depression when society seems to offer only disappointment. A year after his admission to the Garrick, Dickens resigned from it. In each of the following three decades he would rejoin the Garrick and resign again in protest ...”

“... Or Jonathan Lethem’s stoned underachievers, with their mad ideas that turn out to be right. David Foster Wallace gave us protagonists who shunned the physical world in favour of the knottier, more intractable challenges of the mind; George Saunders offers comic heroes who fail excellently. Turn the book over, lift up the flap. We don’t look too bad in ...”

“... to. In 1987, in the catalogue published to accompany an exhibition about the Harlem Renaissance, David Levering Lewis referred to Larsen as ‘the mysterious and lovely Virgin Islander’. Eight years later, in When Harlem Was in Vogue, Lewis relayed the (unsourced) information that Larsen was looked down on by ‘some of her fellow Virgin Islanders’ for ...”

“... Why should​ poets’ deaths carry more weight than those of others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and expands to commemorate, in laconic sentences and judicious fragments, the deaths (sprinkled with quotes and quirks) of novelists, painters, composers, philosophers ...”

“... went on to found Art Monthly in 1976 with Jack and Nell Wendler. Under Townsend, James Faure-Walker had been a contributor to Studio International. Cork made his copy less welcome and Faure-Walker and others set up Artscribe. Eventually Peter and I began to meet at Bertorelli’s for wine, talk, food and more wine. At ...”

“... most origin stories, this one is too telling to be entirely true; it has a frisson, as the critic David Sylvester put it, ‘at once Oedipal and necrophilic’. Although Magritte wasn’t present at the scene, he alludes to it in a few paintings. In The Musings of the Solitary Walker (1926), a man in a bowler hat, a ...”

“... cent, and fell in Yorkshire and the Humber by 8 per cent between 2010 and 2014. Lord Young, now David Cameron’s ‘enterprise tsar’, had to resign in late 2010 after suggesting that people ‘have never had it so good’.It was only after substantial Tory losses in the North at the 2014 European elections that George Osborne launched a regional ...”

“... describes is a traveller’s nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist ...”

“... fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of freebooters, including William Walker, the Tennessee doctor who conquered and ruled Nicaragua for ten months and decimated the population of Costa Rica.Until the end of the 19th century the US state was in no position to undertake imperial projects outside its region, and its projected sphere ...”

“... but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by ...”

“... of historians of witchcraft and exorcism, such as Carlo Ginzburg, Keith Thomas and the late Perkin Walker, and with the theories of anthropologists concerned with possession in contemporary societies, from Alfred Métraux on Haiti to Bruce Kapferer on Sri Lanka. In a similar way, Greenblatt’s essay on Twelfth Night ranges from Galen to Foucault in order to ...”