“... is wonderful (though R. of course notices as I don’t the absurd hat the serving woman is wearing). One of the saints, Bartholomew in the penultimate room, has always looked to me like Arnold Bennett (the author, not my cousin the policeman) but somehow I miss seeing one of my favourites, the Kenwood self-portrait against its two circles, which is ...”

“... again. George Fenton, who is co-ordinating the music, also chips in, but he’s a musician. David Hunter, the director, chips in too, but he isn’t a musician, just knows what atmosphere he wants at various points in the film. In the finish, even I chip in just because I know what I like. And the musicians just nod and listen, try out a few bars here ...”

“... when, with its own poll showing a 6 per cent Labour lead, it leads the front page instead with David Owen’s long-expected endorsement of the Tories. Ha, ha. He quips: ‘And indeed David Owen may have found a last role as hired mute at a Conservative funeral.’ But whose was the last laugh? Pearce still expects the ...”

“... some even burned alive, for same-sex relationships, while the loving sexual relationship between David and Jonathan in the Old Testament has caused generations of biblical translators to tie themselves in knots trying to conceal the obvious. Christ himself made barely any pronouncements condemning sexuality. This has not stood in the way of Church ...”

“... Vernon Howell​ – better known as David Koresh – arrived at Mount Carmel, the Texas base of a Seventh Day Adventist splinter sect called the Branch Davidians, in the summer of 1981. He was 21 years old and looking for a new church. A ‘wandering bonehead’, as he would later describe himself, he had been kicked out of a mainstream Seventh Day Adventist congregation in Tyler, Texas for having sex with the 15-year-old daughter of a church elder (or at least trying to), and for refusing to stop haranguing church leaders about the correct interpretation of scripture ...”

“... At the parts plant, by contrast, she had eased the oppressive routine of the working week by wearing a gingham dress, ‘And I could bully the foreman and everybody.’ Though she didn’t mention a Saint Monday, her week had a regular high point, one that Wilson did not overlook: ‘I enjoyed wearing a clean cap on ...”

“... and then immuring himself in a turret room for exactly eleven days, at the end of which he emerged wearing the same shirt as when he went in but bearing a finished manuscript. Little was then known of the equally concentrated bout of sexual activity which followed: Simenon’s invariable habit, pausing (presumably) to change his shirt, was to drive into town ...”

“... with the classics of the genre, is off. There is another premise, another genre in question. David Selznick told Wilder that ‘mixing gangsters and comedy wouldn’t work,’ and perhaps even Wilder didn’t know at first how wrong his adviser was. Would the St Valentine’s Day Massacre really play as farce? The opening frames of the film offer an ...”

“... of language themselves, at least not in public, but leave it to civilian internationalists like Mr David Watt and Mr Silkin. One also senses that the Navy does not itself use the shark-like term ‘hunter-killer’ for its submarines. We have the good fortune to have a silent and professional military establishment. One of Argentina’s many troubles is that ...”

“... Histoire naturelle rubs up against vitriolic anti-Franco cartoons; Cranach the Elder’s David and Bathsheba is subject to a fierce analytic glare. Throughout, Picasso’s lovers, friends and forebears drift in and out (Vollard, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, Jacqueline Roque, Manet, Rembrandt), taking one role then another in an endless play of ...”

“... challis dress Bendel’s was still on West 57th Street’), the good times especially (‘She was wearing Christian Louboutin shoes’: ‘you saw the red soles when she kneeled at the altar’) and they distinguish one era from the next (‘I look at those photographs now and am struck by how many of the women present were ...”

“... fans, whom he had spent the last 12 months trying to placate by sitting with them at away matches, wearing the team shirt to games, sacking the unpopular Sam Allardyce as manager and replacing him with local hero Kevin Keegan. But all he succeeded in doing was inflating expectations, along with the club’s wage bill, so that now he can’t afford to keep the ...”

“... were fitted out with new clothes suitable for capitalist encounters, they found themselves wearing identical suits, hats and ties.There was a third dimension to Soviet relations with the outside world: direct contact with (non-Communist) foreign intellectuals. This was an unexpected initiative for the Stalinist regime, given that its leaders were so ...”

“... and, more violently, how much they loved the heavily lipglossed singer in a band called Japan. David Sylvian was his name. The girls called him David. So far as I remember, the diary was a pretty spectacular fantasia of adolescent lusts and local hatreds: Dear Katherine, David came ...”

“... But there are immediate difficulties with the book, difficulties of a kind once ascribed by David Lodge to a figure seen at academic conferences: the figure of the Deconstructionist who, radically sceptical about the existence of selfhood, identity and the subject, nonetheless continues to go for an early-morning jog. The jogging Deconstructionist – a ...”