“... days after the birth of their daughter, the future Mary Shelley.Wollstonecraft was described by David Bromwich as ‘the first modern theorist of an idea of individuality’. She strove to effect change not only in the structures of male domination, suggesting, for example, that women should be represented in Parliament, but in the social and psychological ...”

“... notes and drawings he had made of English Gothic, English brickwork and warehouse construction. David Bindman and Gottfried Riemann have edited these notes, interleaving them with Schinkel’s letters home to his wife and they have added contemporary illustrations from other sources, showing places and artifacts referred to in the text. Enhanced by the two ...”

“... of material are – as in my case – not always Professor Middlemas’s), while Michael Artis and David Cobham have edited a detailed and careful examination of the 1974-1979 governments which replaces all previous accounts. What conclusions might the reader draw from all this kind of evidence? Negatively, the historical record suggests that, as against the ...”

“... bequeathing it to his estranged fourth wife, Lynne Frederick, who kept it all to herself, married David Frost with indecent haste and recently died in California of a drug overdose. So much for the facts. One of Roger Lewis’s main achievements in his new and frankly enormous biography – at least four times longer than any of the others – is to have ...”

“... with aberration and divergence. In his brave and inventive reconstruction, Wild Diversions (1972), David Thomson found a good image for it: ‘He did not live in the conventional order from day to day, but grew strong or weak like the wind.’ Obviously this has something to do with the vacillations of his physical health – Arthur Cash brings this out ...”

“... a road novel midway and ends with a sloppy orgy in the Texas desert. The ever ironical narrator, David Bell, is fond of making statements like ‘I was an extremely handsome young man,’ and worships at the altar of Burt Lancaster: ‘Burt in the moonlight was a crescendo of male perfection but no less human because of it.’ ‘I don’t think my first ...”

“... incantation, pure sound. This is something it can never achieve; but it can play with the idea. David Means’s first collection of stories, Assorted Fire Events, teeters on the edge of incantation in long, mesmeric, many sub-claused sentences that threaten to lose you as they go on. I admire his sense of rhythm. At the same time, his writing possesses a ...”

“... In the penultimate chapter of David Copperfield, David and Agnes, after ten years of uneventful but blissful marriage – ‘I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect’ – are sitting by the fire in their house in London, one night in spring, when they receive a visit from an elderly stranger ...”

“... will rather note the vicar who loves Christ but can’t love God. But newcomers to Powys-land may wonder what the fuss is about. The last chapter of John Cowper’s Autobiography has the strange heading ‘There’s a Mohawk in the Sky!’ Is it a man, is it a bird? Is Powysianism a cult, a fan-club, a Welsh academic festival? Let us turn to Recollections ...”

“... powder dry and prepare for a prolonged siege. Although monetarist economists and cost accountants may feel reasonably safe, Norman Tebbit has recorded his dim view of effete scholars who study tribal customs on the Upper Volta, while Sir Keith Joseph’s hostility towards the social sciences has involved the once-mighty Social Science Research Council in ...”

“... between the film director and the actor that their involvement isn’t permanent: the actor may be offered a more desirable part, or the director may feel the need to make a different kind of film. The separation is often painful because the collaboration can be intense, especially so if they had loved each other. In ...”

“... lists were drawn up of such notorious Communists or Communist sympathisers as Brian Walden, David Owen, Robert Mellish, John Stonehouse, Roy Hattersley and Reg Prentice; and even a bogus pamphlet on ‘revolutionary strategy’ for the installation of socialism in Britain was contrived for off-the-record briefing of American journalists, the joint ...”

“... for the elegant simplicity of predictable replication as encoded by rigorous science, historians may wish to settle for the subtle complexity of real life as captured by a more plastic art. This may seem a heavy-handed way of saying that McNeill’s book is so satisfying because it implicitly addresses two different ...”

“... Boswell on the occasion of needling his famous friend with the news that the atheist philosopher David Hume had died well and without repentance. ‘The horror of death, which I had always observed in Dr Johnson, appeared strong tonight.’ Sherwin Nuland a surgeon from Yale, speaks to the Johnson in each of us, to our hunger for knowledge of our inevitable ...”

“... to London in 1844, he tried to play on his hosts’ anxieties: ‘Turkey is a dying man. We may endeavour to keep him alive but we shall not succeed … I fear only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had been merely a friendly ...”