“... least in her marriage to the very dashing, wonderfully intelligent, but ultimately incompetent, David Child. He, too, struggled to overcome a modest background through intellectual and, in his case, political and financial, achievement. Unlike her, he failed. And for six years in the middle of their fifty-year-long, childless marriage, when her career was ...”

“... Modern​ Hollywood isn’t really Hollywood – it’s Calabasas. With everyone now the David O. Selznick of his own social picture, gossip replaced with tweets, and fan magazines with selfies, the grandeur of old Hollywood can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements ...”

“... had infiltrated the Sangatte camp. A year later, with the agreement of the then home secretary, David Blunkett, and his French equivalent, Nicolas Sarkozy, the camp was closed. Blunkett called the Sangatte site ‘a festering sore in Anglo-French relations’. Sarkozy spun its closure as an act of goodwill towards migrants: ‘We have put an end to a ...”

“... policy concern and was seen as not only un-British, but as a state security concern. In 2015 David Cameron called on institutions to devise their own ‘sensible rules’ about face veils, and Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, promised that schools would take a firm lead. He declared that ‘our liberal West values’ must be protected and added that ...”

“... his Irishness, but the editors of this new edition of Goldsmith’s letters, Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy, urge its importance, and they are surely right. Some of the ideas that persistently recur in Goldsmith’s work – opposition to imperialism, scepticism about English notions of liberty – seem to be manifestations of his nationality. He ...”

“... of sex (see innumerable campus novels and many of the works of the postwar American writers whom David Foster Wallace derided as ‘the Great Male Narcissists’). On the page, though, the resulting hybrid is anything but ungainly, and in any case the narrator is out ahead of both types of reader, pointing to Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, a touchstone both for ...”

“... world wars, Joan of Arc and General de Gaulle are central to the French national self-image and F.D. Roosevelt is central to the story of America’s interwar economic recovery, and Nelson Mandela is central to South Africa’s new-found racial harmony. Exalted company for our two great heroes – but surely justified? Not according to the great British ...”

“... original sin, secularised as the problem of anti-social behaviour, has been remarkably resilient. David Trotter believes that what we have learned to call Modernism is more akin to the cumulative trauma of secularisation, and that if we can’t get a wholly convincing sense of the beginnings of Modernism, we can get the next best thing: a sense of what the ...”

“... pleasure that remains to me: I indulge in reading about movies with undiminished enthusiasm. David Thomson has written about his disappointment with contemporary cinema, about how the franchise movie and the blockbuster are killing Hollywood and his hopes, and because I am one of the legion of Thomson’s devoted fans, it cheers me up to hear it. If he ...”

“... were not strictly personal property. In his essay on Warsaw apartments in the 1950s and 1960s, David Crowley quotes Czeslaw Milosz’s remark that ‘to protect his position and his apartment (which he has by the grace of the state), the intellectual is prepared to make any sacrifice or compromise; for the value of privacy in a society that affords little ...”

“... topos of visionary architecture runs back at least to the 1960s), and its scheme is very sci-fi. The ‘Millennium Tower’, a diamond-gridded cone of 170 storeys set two kilometres out in Tokyo Bay, recalls, all at once, the Eiffel Tower, the utopian projects of Russian Constructivism, the dark Deco city of Metropolis and the gigantic geodesic dome that ...”

“... for all the labels used in literary criticism. Take the designation ‘late Modernist’, which David Attwell, one of Coetzee’s most astute early champions, applied to his fiction in the 1990s. Though Attridge prefers this term to the even more fraught ‘postmodernist’, another favourite among Coetzee’s critics, he also acknowledges its ...”

“... self. In Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth Century Art and Fiction, David Trotter, the author of several other books about 19th-century writers, proposes what he calls ‘mess-theory’ (and, as a corollary, ‘litter-theory,’ which he regards as the point at which ‘waste’ and ‘mess’ overlap). Trotter’s main argument ...”

“... efforts, but Boswell conducted his business in a state of perfect confidence. He may have been, as David Hume remarked, ‘very good-humoured, very agreeable and very mad’, but he knew exactly what his talents were, and he drove them home. He wanted to be able to imagine Johnson in every conceivable human situation, and he would provoke him, and set him ...”

“... of Roman water did, a vast and clever system that harnessed rivers and used canals and pipes. For David Sedlak, who divides the past, present and future of water into four ages, this was the beginning of Water 1.0, when the Roman model – sewers to remove dirty water and clean pipes to supply it – was copied in European cities. Drinking-water treatment is ...”