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“... that stir the blood of Middle England. These books tend to be written by popularisers such as Dan Jones, and seem designed to tie in with TV shows and podcasts. Jones, like Weir and Mortimer, also has a major side-hustle in historical fiction, where the drama and intrigue can be fully uncoupled from evidence. There ...”

“... the entrenchment of habeas corpus and the principle of no taxation without representation. So does Dan Jones’s shorter treatment, in some ways the liveliest and most clear-eyed of the three. But none of them quite tackles the long-running constitutional cleavage, which is also part of the Charter’s legacy and which was already evident on day one at ...”

“... place before he was born. He was the great-grandchild of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones, and was thus connected with both the Kipling and the Baldwin families; he was the grandson of an Oxford Professor of Poetry (of no great distinction, it must be admitted); and the son of Angela Thirkell, the novelist of upper-class English life, and James ...”

“... Fitzpatrick, formerly Kelly’s friend, tricks him into persuading his 16-year-old brother Dan to turn himself in – he’s wanted on a false charge of ‘Breaking & Entering & Stealing plus Intent to Rape’ – with the promise that he’ll be found not guilty. He is in fact given three months ‘for Damaging Property’. When the sentence were ...”

“... returned to it and defended as an essential component of a happy life.’ Still, Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran, the compilers of Crap Towns, have been pretty busy: ‘We have scoured the nation collecting nominations for Crap Towns until we could plot a Crap Map . . . The 50 towns we’ve selected for this book are the places that have been nominated the most ...”

“... know, this theory has no subscribers – yet. Though I’m sure it would acquire a few thousand if Dan Brown were to write a novel based on it. Conspiracies lend themselves well to works of fiction: plots make for good plots. The best conspiracy-theory novels – Gravity’s Rainbow, for example – contain more fact than at first seems credible. But lots of ...”

“... Catching news about the Michael Jackson trial, I can’t help being reminded of a caustic song by Dan Bern, a singer less famous than Jackson by several orders of magnitude, called ‘Too Late to Die Young’. ‘The day that Elvis died was like a mercy killing,’ it begins, before turning its attention to the inglorious late careers of other fallen idols of American popular culture, challenging listeners to ‘name the last good film that Marlon Brando made/While trying to keep his kid from going to jail ...”

“... in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson; but even they arrived by what might be called the bohemian route. There are of course other ways in; anybody can see how much space the dons occupy in the respectable papers and magazines. Many moved in by routes that did not necessarily pass ...”

“... has, for Shaw, an extra application. In his Collected Letters 1911-1925, very finely edited by Dan Laurence, Shaw is quite explicit, and most illuminating, about a curious principle which is exhibited in his plays and also has much bearing on his life. ‘All the characters in all my plays,’ he writes to the producer Augustin Hamon (5 November ...”

“... called ‘enumerators’ who went from door to door collecting ‘democracy’s data’. Dan Bouk confesses to ‘romantic ideas’ about the doorstep encounter as a symbolic ‘moment of co-operative civic action’ – the representative of the nation-state carefully attending to each of its members, one by one. That’s the ideal; his ...”

“... of a man who lives ‘somewhere in Cleveland’: ‘He’s freaking out.’ The singer’s name is Dan Bern. His parents moved to Mount Vernon, Iowa, where Bern was born, round about the time that Robert Zimmerman started calling himself Bob Dylan and left Hibbing, Minnesota, to head circuitously east for New York City. Where Bern stands in relation to Dylan ...”

“... perhaps, links up the parts of the novel and is symbolic in its action. A Welshman, David Jones, runs away to sea, survives the sinking of the Titanic, becomes a cook in New York, marries Ludmilla, the daughter of his Russian employer, returns to Wales and the First World War. He is in Ireland during the Rebellion and, because he is posted as ...”

“... of love and politics, of metaphysical technique and traditional Gaelic modes, of dan direach and personal destiny – I knew about all this at second-hand; it was part of that store of useful literary information that accumulates at the back of the literary mind like respected, unread books on the bookshelf. But then, in the early ...”

“... of them – an evening billed as ‘Art and Politics’ – the Black poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of people like me and my friends: white middle-class liberals and radicals, many of whom ...”

“... disturbed girls” in leafy Surrey, really require the patronage of “Uncle” Jimmy Savile?’ Dan Davies asks in his unpublished book about Savile: Many of the 25 or so girls in its care at any one time came from comfortable backgrounds and included the daughters of ambassadors and BBC producers. As a Home Office-approved school, funding came from Social ...”