“... that the turtle is alive?’ is a welcome diversion. A ten-year-old girl says she would prefer a nice clean robot: ‘Its water looks dirty. Gross.’ More usually, votes for the robots echo my daughter’s sentiment that in this setting, aliveness doesn’t seem worth the trouble. A 12-year-old girl is adamant: ‘For what the turtles do, you didn’t have ...”

“... self-pampering.’ Whatever the reason for their failure, the history of the Cambridge baths is a nice case of the ambivalence of the modern world’s engagement with the ancient. It shows the combination of enthusiasm and lack of interest, learned reconstruction and total miscomprehension that underpins most attempts at the revival of antiquity. In ...”

“... slit his back open, danced on him, and an epic conversation took place. Does that feel nice, Stepan? Awful. And those you mistreated, did it feel nice to them? It was awful. Did you think it would be awful for you someday? No, I didn’t. Well, you should have, Stepan.’ And yet the Cossacks are seductive ...”

“... in this night club,’ Mustafa says in English, with a suppressed smile. ‘They were very nice in Moscow.’ He worked for years as a merchant in Russia. ‘You get to know them, the Russians, they are very nice people. And the women. Oh, the women.’ In a low tone and in English, which no one else ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 1977. In that year, two contributors to a Times Literary Supplement survey, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, spoke so highly of her work as to effect a change in this situation. Three more novels by Barbara Pym were published, this time by Macmillan, who finally added to them in 1982 – two years after the writer had herself died – the book originally ...”

“... created by Paul Spooner. They can be observed in motion on the hour, every hour, but are almost as nice when they are still. Three of them feature animals. One, called Winter, has 16 blackbirds rotating on a number of axes, swooping and cavorting like an errant mobile. It is derived from an earlier version, inspired by the drawings of Johann Knopf, a patient ...”

“... denial. Washington/Lucas just sees himself as a decent, honourable man, whatever he does. He’s nice to his mother and he marries a lovely Puerto Rican girl. There is one scene where he cracks up, beautifully placed to show how much of his mind and feelings he has closeted away, refused to inspect. At a party in his apartment one guest is sniffing ...”

“... private pursuits so often get out of hand. This was Hobbes and Bentham’s point. It would be nice to think that we have moved beyond their world, in which self-serving professors, bishops and dukes got to call the shots. But we haven’t, even if the professors might now be podcasters and the dukes are more likely to be tech titans. Unaccountable power ...”

“... On 18 July​ 2003, the body of the weapons inspector David Kelly was found in the woods on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire, two months after he’d revealed that the Blair administration had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Rachel Wells, the central character in Number 11 and the narrator of the first of its five overlapping stories, was ten when Kelly’s body was discovered ...”

“... of isolation and unease, of hopelessness. The strange democracy of madness is his theme: David Hume and his breakdown, as described to the physician George Cheyne; and from Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, the story of the idiot boy, who spent the summer eating bees, his only earthly occupation. Porter takes his cue from Burton’s ...”

“... that in Germany Angela Merkel was nearly flattened herself for having allegedly espoused it. David Davis has promised not to swerve to the right, but as he is already standing on the right touchline, that does not mean much. According to David Cameron, one of the other candidates, Davis is a man of great ...”

“... and Randolph Quirk) jostle with poets and novelists (including Medbh McGuckian and Amy Tan). David Dabydeen writes ‘On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, and discusses, in impeccably establishment English, a question that might just as well come under ‘Art’: how does a black writer in English find an authentic voice: what does s/he ...”

“... involves the contrast between the work published in her lifetime – which seems so aware, as David Kalstone put it, ‘of the smallness and dignity of human observation and contrivance’ – and the pain and disorder of her often very messy life. Born in 1911, Bishop was effectively orphaned as a small child: her father died before she was one; in ...”

“... used to say. The new version is ‘Zimbabwe is kenge,’ which means roughly the same thing. David Caute’s portrait of white mores is savage, but like so many visitors before and after him, he was fascinated – seduced – by Rhodesia. It was, and is, a country which captivates even as it appals, and it has always been so much easier to explain the ...”