“... he saw them approach and climb a prominent rock buttress (known as the Second Step) at 28,400 ft – and go ‘strongly’ for the summit. Clouds then gathered and that was the last that was seen of them. Despite his clear recollections and the contemporary notes he made, Odell was bullied by sceptical cross-examiners after he returned home (as he was for ...”

“... of Richard Vinen’s superb history, the best accounts of National Service were fictional: David Lodge’s Ginger, You’re Barmy is a particularly successful evocation of the miseries and absurdities of the conscript’s life.* But Vinen, who was born in 1963, when the last national serviceman was demobbed, draws on memoirs, interviews and official ...”

“... has pointed upwards with unchanging finger for more than four years past’, she has become David Copperfield’s Agnes: ‘She was so beautiful, she was so good.’ The bad wife dies, and David is free to marry the excellent woman he almost didn’t appreciate until too late, ‘ever pointing upward, Agnes; ever ...”

“... The real challenge facing US forces was not to kill the enemy but to win over the population. As David Kilcullen, an influential adviser to US commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, put it, rather than ‘assuming that killing insurgents is the key task’, the military needed to focus on ‘good governance backed by solid population security and economic ...”

“... not have written The Corrections to be optioned by HBO – the chamber music of our time, with David Simon our Mendelssohn – but he agreed to the option, and so the only thing that prevented his book’s debasement was an inept script that died in development. Kraus writes in Franzen’s translation: ‘To be responsive to literature, you cannot be ...”

“... beloved ‘the only disciple of philosophy among all the girls of our age’. Heloise? Abelard? David Luscombe, in his magisterial new edition of the canonical letters, is inclined to say no. Teachers of this era, he notes, commonly exchanged flirtatious letters with their female students; it was an accepted way of teaching Latin rhetoric. Yet the tone of ...”

“... of uncharismatic right-wing leaders came to an end with the accession to the party leadership of David Cameron, a smoother, less straightforward kind of Conservative. Cameron recognised that if he was to ‘detoxify’ the Tory brand, loosen its association with uncaring Thatcherite economics, then he needed to explode the assumption that the Conservatives ...”

“... It was ‘odd’, he said, to deny that Islam was the central element of the various struggles. David Cameron has moved in the same direction. The day after the 7/7 attacks, when he was shadow education secretary, he said that ‘the Muslim community in this country doesn’t support what is happening.’ Earlier this year he modified that remark, arguing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from government: from the government, that is, of the rump UK, minus Scotland. The reason is that David Cameron, attempting to outflank the SNP during a midwinter silly season offensive, has managed to provoke Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, into a daring dash for independence. Salmond is not – as the English fail miserably to understand – an ...”

“... in with Skin Deep, a kind of commonplace book with the quotations left unattributed, much like David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger, though Shields is not here; Ander Monson, David Markson, Ben Friedlander and other recent authors of detourned or bricolaged ‘new essays’ aren’t included either – too ...”

“... as babies. There were, it seemed, patterns and cycles to disadvantage. Around the same time David Barker began to show the ways in which nutrition during pregnancy had long-lasting effects not just on babies’ growth, but also on their risk as adults of developing heart disease, diabetes and obesity. Barker argued that to improve the health of the next ...”

“... I was going to eat that disgusting food. Soon everyone else had finished theirs. I noticed that David Driver had a boiled egg and some toast. It looked delicious. On the other hand, David had muscular dystrophy which was going to kill him soon anyway, which must have been why he was excused pilchards and likewise ...”

“... getting less rare by the day, but rare nevertheless. In conveying a sense of the adult politician, David Mendell’s book is surprisingly good. Mendell can’t write as well as Obama, but he’s a reasonably honest, capable and diligent reporter for the Chicago Tribune and takes his assignment seriously. What’s most interesting about the book is that Mendell ...”

“... certainly she would have thought so, and that is clearly the point in the mock-Tudor subtitle of David Loades’s biography. Mary’s failure dealt a permanent blow to England’s long-standing alignment with the Habsburgs and their Burgundian predecessors. Both Mary and Elizabeth had a capacity for inspiring loyalty from close friends, who formed their ...”