“... life. There is nothing he likes better than losing himself in a new passion: soup-making, yo-yos, rock climbing. It rarely lasts, because past a certain point the rules of the game that had seemed to liberate hidden forms of expression come to stifle his urge to experiment. But that simply means it’s time to try something new. For Nguyen, we only learn ...”

“... back to back. In mainstream cinema, performers mainly ‘go about feigning genuine humanity’, as David Foster Wallace wrote in his marvellous essay on pornography, ‘Big Red Son’. In porn, however, defences sometimes slip, and what Wallace has a porn fan characterise as the ‘what-do-you-call … human-ness’ of a person is allowed to shine ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it: ‘In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt.’ In a similar mood, David Thomson published a biography in which every chapter ends with a dialogue of self-examination by the critic, and in which Welles’s best-known innovation is side-swiped and helped to its feet all in the course of a sentence: ‘In truth, there was more ...”

“... Spain is a traditional rival of Britain in most international affairs, from the World Cup to the Rock. Moreover, the Spanish were verbal supporters of the Argentine side in what’s usually called by Spaniards la guerra de las Malvinas. They, too, refuse to call the islands Falklands. But this is not the first time that the Nobel Prize-winner of 1982 has ...”

“... The Moon is 240,000 miles from the Earth. The surface temperature is 134ºC. Age of the oldest rock collected from the Moon: over four billion years. Then we have the first in a serious of perfect Stroudisms: driving time (to the Moon) by car at 70 mph: 135 days. Walking time at three miles per hour: 8.6 years. The water on the side of the Earth which ...”

“... with a chairman who accused me of being a disciple of Sorel, a writer of whom I had barely heard. (David Caute sardonically notes that ‘the allusion to Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile to the New Left: one may search in vain for any favourable reference to Sorel in New Left ideology.’) I had also been National ...”

“... at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men, some gay (like Rock Hudson), others heterosexual (like Farrell). Sometimes, Farrell took her to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had been going since she was a child star in National Velvet and where she liked to order caviar and chocolate-covered ...”

“... times have changed, incidentally: Hattersley bobs up all over the place in these pages, and David Steel gets a couple of footnotes, but Margaret Thatcher, Neil Kinnock, David Owen and Arthur Scargill make no appearance.) Mrs Castle was generally rated a highly effective departmental minister, and from these diaries ...”

“... in a family follows the departure of a particularly tiresome and exacting house guest. Elizabeth David herself – a veteran by marriage of wartime Cairo and pre-Independence Delhi – advised her readers thirty years ago: ‘Devote all the time and resources at your disposal to the building up of a fine kitchen. It will be, as it should be, the most ...”

“... Did it hold the political whiphand? In the second volume of his trilogy on the City since 1815, David Kynaston repeatedly shows his familiarity with the controversies. But his technique is to deal fair-mindedly and unexceptionably with them, more or less in passing; the book makes no claim to be an incisive or provocative analysis of the City’s role in ...”

“... In J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Disgrace, which is set in a violent post-apartheid South Africa, David Lurie, a Cape Town academic, reaches a similar conclusion when his daughter Lucy is gang-raped by three black men at her isolated homestead in the Eastern Cape. ‘But why did they hate me so?’ Lucy asks. ‘I had never set eyes on them.’ ‘It was ...”

“... to the tweeness of McSweeney’s or the politics of n+1, the one that ran the poetry of indie rock stars. Overeducated, underemployed, unloved, tortured by appetites for drink, junk food and sometimes junk, Lipsyte’s losers trace their paths of permanent frustration through diners, donut shops and dive bars in New York City and northern New ...”

“... breathtaking inanities as the TV anchorwoman’s remark that, for her, ‘those Navy Seals really rock.’ The official aim was to prevent the emergence of any image of the war that might stir dissent, and in some ways this has proved successful. There have been very few photographs in the US of dead and dying Iraqi women and children, though the rest of the ...”