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“... Jacobson uses fiction with force and delicacy to alienate it and make it strange. Yonadab, King David’s nephew, the narrator of The Rape of Tamar, observes dryly on the last page that history has recently been invented by Abiathar the priest, whom Biblical scholars have named ‘The Court Historian’. A remarkable man, Abiathar. A truly original ...”

“... years ago. It is too easy to embrace the solutions without understanding the problems. As David Pears observes, ‘when we read one of Wittgenstein’s discussions of philosophical illusions, there are two things which we may not find it easy to hold together in our minds simultaneously, his success in dispelling them and the depth and difficulty of ...”

“... in it: tiny trout probably, because it’s near a pine plantation, making the water acidic, which means the trouts’ bones don’t grow. But the lough with the big trout is on the other side of the plantation, so why aren’t they affected? Local lore has it that the trout feed on freshwater shrimps there and grow huge in that reed-rimmed, weedy, almost ...”

“... Women Writing about Money (1995) gets more thoroughly into the topic than a biographer can, and David Nokes provides even more insights than Tomalin into (say) Austen and legacy-hunting. In fact Tomalin’s considerable strengths are surely of another kind – to do with her modern, matter-of-fact tone of voice and her narrowed focus on Jane Austen as the ...”

“... no need to question since for her there was now only one thing – Stephen.’ Even their dog David responds to Stephen’s masterful nature, seeing that ‘queer, intangible something about her that appealed to the canine manhood in him’. (But David is fickle: when a real man comes on the scene he finds Martin ‘a ...”

“... production schedule? But the BBC was quick to announce the younger, extraordinarily attractive David Tennant as his successor, with a glow, almost, of parental pride. Fine-boned and wriggly, somehow, like a silky dog, Tennant has a helpless quality, which lends him great adorability. ‘My girlfriend is besotted,’ leicesterbloke writes on the digitalspy ...”

“... lies rather in his sly portrayal of the squad’s commanding officer as Napoleon. As the historian David Todd has argued, this foreign policy disaster exposed the hollowness of the emperor’s promises to promote the trade and influence of France throughout the world. After Napoleon’s overthrow in 1870 and death in exile at Chislehurst in Kent, the fate of ...”

“... dicta gathered together in the Yale Book does bring to mind a quotation from the only song by David Byrne for which it finds space: ‘You may ask yourself/Well, how did I get here?’How did we get here? What can the history of books of quotations tell us about what they’re now expected to contain? As everybody knows, ‘there is no new thing under the ...”

“... Rose makes many comments on the way the pharmaceutical industry helps shape diagnoses; it is by no means a passive participant that finds cures for known disorders. Pfizer, the folks who provide Viagra to old men, now offer Anipryl to old dogs with CDS; its publicity cites the 62 per cent study. I wonder who paid for that study, by the way? In the ...”

“... his anointed successor John Connally, the former Democrat governor of Texas. In Nixon’s Shadow, David Greenberg explores Nixon’s place in modern American culture. While other politicians struggled for name recognition, manifold images of Nixon infiltrated every level of American life from the early 1950s and persisted long after the Watergate scandal ...”

“... and natural history within a ‘big history’ such as those outlined by the American writers David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown – or, in the terminology of Edward O. Wilson, in a ‘consilience’, a convergence of intellectual disciplines, humanities with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to ...”

“... Own but her essay on Montaigne, with its celebration of ‘the life within us’ that by no means accords with the person we present in public, and it is Montaigne who provides the epigraph to the book’s final chapter, counselling against ‘the condition of living by reference to others’. She is fond of Montaigne-like distinctions between ...”

“... since Garnett’s version (and five separate revisions of it), there have been translations by David Magarshack (1958), Andrew MacAndrew (1970), Julius Katzer (1980), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1990), David McDuff (1993), Ignat Avsey (1994) and, most recently, Michael Katz. Apparently there are at least ...”

“... not apply to higher-cost subjects such as science and engineering? ‘Market discipline’ surely means that if universities cannot find enough students to pay the fees for such subjects, then they should not be offering them. A similar query may be raised about the proposal to maintain some element of the central grant for ‘strategically important and ...”

“... a theoretical, but actually non-existent, one-bedroom flat. This is what the ‘bedroom tax’ means.‘It’s just very, very hard to deal with,’ Quinn told me when I visited her. ‘This is my home, this isn’t just a council place where I live. They can only do it to me because I have nothing. I’m sure if they had their way they would kill us. I ...”