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“... though 20th-century Conservatives have included a few Whiggish eccentrics. The Liberal Party of David Steel bears little resemblance to it, except in some residual link with religious dissent and the geographical periphery. The old-style Labour Party inherited some Whig nostrums, especially in foreign policy and constitutional matters. The Tory Party, on ...”

“... of the dark. His behaviourist techniques never succeeded in curing him of this fear of the dark. David Cohen makes the most of the limited material available on Watson’s early life, but we get just enough to see him, and his doubts and uncertainties, as a bright ambitious student in an undistinguished college. He moves to Chicago, carries out truly ...”

“... Why ‘earthlings’​ ? David Miller isn’t drawing a contrast with justice for creatures from outer space. Nor is he taking issue directly with Ronald Dworkin’s ‘justice for hedgehogs’ in Dworkin’s book of 2011 with that title, although Miller does say in a footnote that he disagrees with him. He has in his sights the ‘neo-Augustinians’, as he calls them, like the late G ...”

“... del Fuego inhabited, as Perec put it in a letter to Maurice Nadeau, ‘by a race of athletes wearing white tracksuits emblazoned with a big black W’. The 99 chapters of his last and longest novel, La Vie mode d’emploi (1978), were arrived at through three interlocking constraints: the planning of a narrative around a cross-section of a Parisian ...”

“... essays – during the period of composition the world does nothing but give you gifts.They love David Foster Wallace here, and I have read no one but him for months. His books are everywhere in tall voluble stacks – a writer is always everywhere when you are working on them. I feel partially disrobed when I see his name. At my sickest, I had begun asking ...”

“... has reconstructed is only a ‘family romance’, an operetta played out on her own toy stage. And David Lodge’s heroine complains that she is ‘getting dragged into a classic realist text, full of causality and morality. How can I get out of it?’ Trust the contemporary novelist for that, we might think – though, for Lodge’s characters, it’s a close ...”

“... 1%’ signs and shouting at the delegates: ‘Don’t look at me, you might catch poverty.’ David Brooks of the New York Times walked by. He always seemed to be walking by. A man pointed at the ‘Mr 1%’ sign and said: ‘That should be “Mr 0.001%”, thank you.’ They were considering a trip to a strip club to confront delegates about ‘issues ...”

“... Europe, would come to the Zam Zam, sometimes for the martinis but usually to be thrown out. When David Letterman came to town to do a week of shows his advance people phoned Bruno to see if he would throw Letterman out of the bar on the show. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you,’ Bruno said over the phone. ‘Who’s ...”

“... that far country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey Hart, remember it first and then study it up in order to flesh out their memories with circumstantial detail. In either case, historiography is given the task that Wordsworth assigned to poetry: to reconcile the seemingly unrelated worlds ...”

“... damned at her feet: Marianne Faithfull, the ‘Fabulous Beast’ herself, doing a photo-shoot for David Bailey, ‘sprawling with her legs wide apart, her black satin crotch glinting between her scrawny 55-year-old thighs’. Melvyn Bragg, filming his reaction shots for the South Bank Show, ‘smiling, simpering, giggling, looking down at his ...”

“... gratifying that people die while watching it, round and round for ever, in an endless loop. David Foster Wallace always had trouble finishing his novels. And yet he put in this one a thought so absorbing and delightful that you could easily imagine yourself, like the rat in the experiment, pressing the lever over and over. ‘Thousands of times an ...”

“... someone else back and that’s what neither of them was good at.28 March. Another death, this time David Storey whom I liked and found sympathetic, though I might run into him only occasionally and most often in M&S. It was always cheering, even if these days he was often shuffling as much from the medicines he was taking as from old age. But he would call me ...”

“... On the fourth Sunday in March a group of toughs stood guard at the entrance to the fairground wearing little black and orange St George’s ribbons (denoting the fight against fascism). They weren’t huge guys like the most violent pro-Russian protesters in Kharkiv, some of whom came from a mixed martial arts training centre called Oplot ...”

“... and a peacock called Mirabell, all of it recorded with the help of Merrill’s longtime partner, David Jackson, during twenty years of séances using a Ouija board at their home in Stonington, Connecticut. This volume tips in at 560 pages. Merrill also wrote novels, plays and two memoirs. Born to enormous wealth, he had little to distract him from his ...”

“... wife and small son. ‘Home’ is a pre-fab, decked for the occasion with Union Jacks. The wife is wearing a neat, knee-length utility-model dress. The little boy, in shorts, pullover and tie, looks healthy and well-fed. All three are ecstatic with the happiness of finding each other alive again after a war in which the family at home had been as likely to be ...”