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“... for the NME as a teenager in the late 1970s. In the decades since he has published just two books: Vital Signs, a career-spanning but skimpy anthology from 1998, and It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, a recent collection of music writing, much of it first published in the LRB. Fassbinder, after emerging out of the avant-garde, quickly became a well-known ...”

“... practice of tweaking the King of Spain’s beard – or, in this particular case, stealing a more vital part of his anatomy, the port of the Havannah, which is the key to the Spanish possessions in the New World. It would, however, be uncharitable to insist that this is a historical novel with a simplistic message. Hugh Thomas knows a great deal about the ...”

“... wilderness, Pym’s novel Quartet in Autumn had at last been accepted for publication: Larkin and David Cecil had independently named her as their choice of ‘most undervalued writer’ in the 75th-anniversary number of the TLS. As Pym’s diary records, they had kipper pâté to start, after sherry; and then ‘veal done with peppers and tomatoes, Pommes ...”

“... David Wallace​ ’s Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 contains 82 chapters by an enormous team of international contributors spanning what Wallace describes as nine ‘itineraries’: Paris to Béarn; Calais to London; St Andrews to Finistère; Basel to Danzig; Avignon to Naples; Palermo to Tunis; Cairo to Constantinople; Mount Athos to Muscovy; Venice to Prague ...”

“... adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was to control the Gulf and stop any Soviet influence over ‘that vital energy resource upon which the economic and political stability both of Western Europe and of Japan depend’, or else the ‘geopolitical balance of power would be tipped’. In a piece for the Atlantic a few months after 9/11, Benjamin Schwarz and ...”

“... world’s population that doesn’t live in Cheam. This paper wasn’t invented by Dacre but by David English, variously described as the best editor on Fleet Street and the biggest liar since Herodotus. (English once invented a whole interview with Betty Ford and on another occasion pretended to have been in Dallas the day Kennedy was shot.) By the end of ...”

“... the refinement of their collective manners; and that teaching people how to converse politely was vital to society’s moral progress. In the early 18th century, the state of public discourse was a matter of particular concern. Religious invective was fuelled by the institution of religious toleration for Protestant dissenters in 1689, while the collapse of ...”

“... New members are required to adopt all of this. The laws governing the internal single market are vital to the working of the European Union, which has always operated as a ‘common market’. Such laws include those governing workers’ rights, including the right to work anywhere within the EU – which appears to be central to the Brexiters’ enmity to ...”

“... extremely difficult – the rocks were a mass of red mudstones and sandstones – but has been vital to determining what happened in the late Permian era. Some of the most engaging chapters of Benton’s book concern his experiences in the other major bridging sequence of strata, along the River Sakmara in the Urals. In the mid 1990s Russian geologists ...”

“... debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David Kalstone wrote, ‘in saying it appeared with that sense of completeness of utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South).’ The book they were talking about was ...”

“... horrible that was sticking to them. A spectacular daube at a dinner party, recipe by Elizabeth David but with a freehand addition by the cook, had it – lips this time pursed, thumb and forefinger connected to indicate perfection. A work of art, of course, had a je ne sais quoi, spoken with wide eyes and lips apart to perform a look of wonder, and one ...”

“... David Attenborough​ was born in 1926, the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Elizabeth II. He began hosting Zoo Quest on BBC television in 1954; not quite seventy years later, his latest series, Wild Isles, has just finished airing (it’s still available on iPlayer, or Amazon Prime for those outside the UK ...”

“... It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg and William Roberts – and a revolutionary moment in British art. Even to express support for Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions was daring and radical. Nevinson, having seen a contemporary art show in Venice, knew he was ‘bored with ...”

“... off. Nationalists, however, are as skilled as any at shooting themselves in the foot, or even more vital parts: the SNP walked out of the Scottish Constitutional Convention at its opening meeting. Such is the bloody-minded failure to co-operate which arouses Tom Nairn’s most scornful satire in an essay outstanding in a collection which is lively but ...”

“... intellectuals. This is the question of whether and how much to torture a prisoner in possession of vital information that would save lives but only if revealed promptly. (Gonzales found parts of the Geneva Convention’s provisions and legal protocol ‘quaint’ in the light of the need to ‘quickly obtain information … to avoid further atrocities’.) A ...”