“... Almost the last time they met, he showed him several poems; among others a ballad on the murder of David Rizzio. ‘Such a balled!’ said J. He came to J. to dinner, and was asked for copies. ‘I burnt them,’ was the reply; ‘you did not seem to like them, and I wrote them to please you, so I burnt them.’ In July 1779 William Enfield in the Monthly ...”

“... the lexicographer and informed by the general linguist, whose global concerns are represented by David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. ‘My purpose in writing this book,’ says Professor Crystal in his preface, ‘is to celebrate the existence of human language, and to provide a tribute to those who engage in its study.’ This purpose ...”

“... more dramatic than in Miami, a great resort and retirement capital for the Northeast, now – as David Rieff puts it in Going to Miami – a mirror city to Havana. There have been no less than five recent books on Miami, of which those by Rieff and Joan Didion,* quite different in tone and treatment, are the most prominent. Miami has also become crucial to ...”

“... to diverge sharply from Owenite positions – a trend which underlines the damaging effect of David Owen’s manifest preference for the Conservatives over Labour during the 1987 Election. Most interesting of all is the attempt to measure the strength of commitment to their party by each party’s followers. This confirms, what some political scientists ...”

“... but esoteric science. The part of Bill Clinton is here played by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist David Baltimore and the junior female colleague is not Monica Lewinsky but a Japanese-Brazilian-American immunologist named Thereza Imanishi-Kari. Their relations are not sexual but wholly collegial. The out-of-control independent counsel is not Kenneth Starr but ...”

“... We won’t find, for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by ...”

“... memorable put-downs they engendered: Geoffrey Grigson’s ‘Old Jane’ assaults in New Verse; F.R. Leavis’s crack about the Sitwells belonging to ‘the history of publicity’; Larkin-Amis’s prize ‘for the book of the year combining the greatest pretension and the least talent: it is called The Osbert’ (Larkin’s spoof award echoed one of ...”

“... in the Louvre and it reopened in 1818 as a gallery for pictures by great living artists (including David, then in political exile). The creation of the first European museum of modern art was thus something of an expedient, but the political impulse behind it was not ephemeral. No subsequent French regime dared to neglect it. Unsurprisingly, the character of ...”

“... out of line. Enter Muhammad Ali, who over the next few years was to change the face of boxing. David Remnick’s book in fact concentrates on the two astonishing fights Ali had with Liston (Ali won the title in the first and defended it successfully in the second), and on the relationship between Ali, Liston and Patterson. For Remnick, as for most ...”

“... when it comes to sounding out the limits of what they achieved. I had finished writing this when David Anfam’s catalogue raisonné of Rothko’s work came to hand. This first volume lists and illustrates all the paintings on canvas. They are reproduced more or less in proportion and are presented in chronological order. The catalogue illustrations thus ...”

“... when he encountered them among Hebridean chiefs. But Auchinleck’s Scotland, for all the David Humes and Adam Smiths and Hugh Blairs, still had one foot in times when family feuds were settled by the spear and the firing of houses. To the old taunt, Boswell’s guts responded in the old way. Meanwhile Boswell went on wrestling vainly with his own ...”

“... of them published records of their lives, in ruder or more polished form. For labour historians, David Vincent says, the 142 autobiographies of 1790 to 1850 that he explores, some of them unearthed by his own researches, represent material that has been unaccountably neglected. A man must think very well of himself, Jane Austen’s reluctant diner-out ...”

“... If the publishers thought they were going to get the kind of sputtering firework that one of David Frost’s script associates might help him deliver into a tape-recorder, they haven’t. This is a book meant to be read and even kept. Indeed it might have more keepers than readers, since a probable majority of buyers will be the people mentioned in the ...”

“... French’s Bleeding Heart, Malcolm Bradbury’s Stepping Westward and Rates of Exchange, and David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World. Now, all around the large cabin, other refugees from Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only and from Gene Wilder in The Woman in Red have their noses stuck into novels. Could it be that a certain kind of novel is being ...”

“... of a historical phenomenon. The occasional cause of the foundation of the BAAS was a letter from David Brewster, in Edinburgh, to Charles Babbage, in London, suggesting this new initiative in their campaign to halt the ‘decline of science’ in Britain. The efficient cause of success was the Reverend William Venables Vernon Harcourt, founder of the York ...”