“... Pauline Kael took against the rainbow at the end of David Lean’s film Doctor Zhivago. It was a ‘disgraceful effect’, she said, ‘a coarse gesture of condescension and appeasement to the Russians’, and she asked if Lean and Robert Bolt would have placed a rainbow ‘over the future of England’. Actually it’s difficult to think of David Lean placing rainbows anywhere much, and more significantly, the mood of the rainbow, if not the actual image, is fully there in Boris Pasternak’s novel, as Russian as you can get ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as if they’d just been done with Persil in a boil wash. One of those long summer days, my friend David and I got caught after stealing powdered floor cleaner from the local supermarket and pouring a huge mound of it in a doorway. The manager went in search of our mothers and made them pay for our strange artwork. They brought buckets, ...”

“... image is trapped inside the prism. No one around you can see it – it’s almost a hallucination. David Hockney, who took up drawing with a modern camera lucida in 1999, described it in Secret Knowledge (2001) as projecting not ‘a real image of the subject, but an illusion of one in the eye’:At first I found the camera lucida very difficult to use ...”

“... was a constant worry about American unreliability. ‘The Americans,’ according to a 1946 FO briefing paper, ‘are a mercurial people, unduly swayed by sentiment and prejudice . . . Their Government is handicapped by an archaic constitution, sometimes to the point of impotence, and their policy is to an exceptional degree at the mercy of both ...”

“... loudspeakers on the underside of the aircraft, through which might emerge’, according to David Pascoe, ‘passages from Memories of Lenin, interspersed with exhortations about the Five-Year Plan’. Eighty red lights on the fuselage allowed it to flash slogans to the remotest regions as it swooped across the Soviet Union at night. The first foreigner ...”

“... the Cold War squarely on the United States. The Soviet Union is gone, but this attitude persists. David Caute’s narrative in The Dancer Defects is neither triumphalist nor conspiratorial. He tells a sober story of high cultural exchanges and contests subject to a political climate fluctuating between freeze and thaw, crusade and coexistence. Unlike ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Phil. 5.44, B.Afr. 22.5, App. BC 1.80.366. Vell, 2.29.1, Val.Max. 5.2.9, Plut. Pomp. 6, Dio fr. 107.1’. The sources cited range from contemporaries to ones of the early third century AD: there is no indication of the context of these heterogeneous passages, and no discussion of their standpoint or reliability. So the reader can tell neither whether ...”

“... joke being a joker’s mother. I discover in the new revised edition of Ernest Mossner’s life of David Hume that the young philosopher was said to have been in a drawing-room when a dreadful smell broke out, and was blamed indignantly on the dog. But then Hume was heard to say: ‘Oh do not hurt the Beast. It is not Pod, it is Me!’ The story places the ...”

“... of her civil servants, and of a political spectrum of Junior Ministers from Michael Meacher to David Owen. It now appears that she was often less loyal to them in her thoughts. But we must leave God to try her for these. It was by her actions that she led them, and from out in front. She lived in the shadow of ‘In Place of Strife’, which looms over the ...”

“... an attempt to steer the party away from socialism – the attempt on which William Rodgers and David Owen seem to be embarked, and which has led Roy Jenkins and David Marquand to abandon the party. A desperate public cry to Shirley Williams: why have you got so lost in that company, one with ineffable self-confidence but ...”

“... In Vienna’s small world I had no idea that scientists of the calibre of J.D. Bernal, W.L. Bragg, David Keilin and Dorothy Hodgkin existed: how then could I have even tried to emulate them? It was Cambridge that made me, not Vienna. The longest chapter in Medawar’s book concerns scientific life and manners. I like his admonition not to regard manual work as ...”