“... mind in Whitehall because, while it is implied throughout his absorbing and well-researched book, David Leigh has refrained from going into the historical origins of Whitehall’s almost pathological obsession with secrecy. A young investigative journalist, with a healthy distaste for oligarchy in a country which boasts too much about its imagined heritage of ...”

“... the Museum of Rouen to inspire him when he was writing the story called ‘Un Coeur Simple’. David Hockney produced an etching to illustrate that story, and it is reproduced on the dust-cover of Julian Barnes’s novel. The narrator is interested – in an untidy, stream-of-consciousness way – in the significance of that parrot, appearing to the old ...”

“... a value on titles,’ he purred, ‘and I go with the great stream of life.’ Another member was David Garrick, who grew up alongside Johnson in provincial Lichfield, and shot to prominence in his twenties for the revolutionary naturalism of his acting style, notably his startling performance as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the ...”

“... couldn’t take it.’ The press, though, were being given a lead by the lawyers. Mervyn Griffith-Jones, in his closing address for the prosecution at Ward’s trial (a role he had also performed at the ‘Lady Chatterley’ trial three years earlier), told the jurors that ‘the evil goes very deep.’ Ward, they were repeatedly reminded, was a man who kept ...”

“... Formby, who replaced Iain McNicol as general secretary under Corbyn, has now been replaced by David Evans, a figure popular on the Labour right. Rebecca Long-Bailey, the left’s candidate to replace Corbyn, has already been sacked from the shadow cabinet. The party’s National Executive Committee has a majority defined ostensibly by loyalty to ...”

“... for power and their early heady days in office. It was in an interview with one of them, Thomas K. Jones, whom President Reagan appointed Deputy Under-Secretary of Defence for Research and Engineering, Strategic and Theatre Nuclear Forces, that Robert Scheer heard the phrase from which he took the title of his book: ‘if there are enough shovels to go ...”

“... loudly, pulled faces and made jokes. After they were convicted, the judge, Mr Justice Kenneth Jones, who sentenced them to be detained during Her Majesty’s Pleasure, wrote to the Home Secretary that ‘neither displayed any real remorse. Their evidence was obviously untruthful. I have no doubt that they both attacked the deceased ... their knives ...”

“... of diagnosis had become to justify confinement and coercive treatment. The writings of Laing and David Cooper were early influences on Basaglia, though he didn’t meet Laing until 1969 when he visited Kingsley Hall. What he witnessed there was fundamentally different from what was taking place at Gorizia, operating outside the state healthcare system and ...”

“... only of divorce but also of deference and authority. Social historians neglect it at their peril. David Kynaston in Family Britain 1951-57 gives a pretty full account, but in Peter Hennessy’s Having It So Good: Britain in the 1950s the only Peter Townsend in the index is the sociologist of that name. Even Brown does not quite do justice to the ...”

“... of Black swimmers, recently on view at the Barbican. The pink panels of Grove Lane (2000) suggest David Hockney’s flattened pool scenes. It doesn’t include the figures that appear in Anderson’s other pool scenes: the water is undisturbed; a single ladder is the only indication that the bright blue block at the bottom of the canvas is – or was – a ...”

“... Fourteen inches by 11, and weighing six pounds 13 ounces, David O. Selznick’s Hollywood is less a coffee-table book than a coffee table without legs. Its credits ape a blockbuster movie’s: ‘Executive Producer: Robert Gottlieb – Associate Producer: Martha Kaplan’, etc; and its first page opens like cinema curtains on a wider-than-Panavision main title modelled on Gone with the Wind ...”

“... Order of the Brown Nose would stumble before long on an obsequious supplementary question from David Evans, one of the very first Tories to make a million out of privatisation (in his case from rubbish collection). Again and again, at Prime Minister’s Question Time, the blustering MP for Welwyn and Hatfield would rise to sing the praises of his hero in ...”

“... Brian Stanley, Stanley said he thought his own phone was tapped too – by his own members. Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, the ‘terrible twins’ of the Trade Unions in the period which toppled the Heath Government, became the leading spokesmen for wage restraint and cuts during the Labour Government, and were rewarded by being blacklisted by MI5. Benn ...”

“... these bridges were otherwise pretty much the same as those liable to be cut away under Indiana Jones as he is chased through the South American jungle. New Zealand’s swing bridges came to mind when it turned out that the Millennium Bridge had a wobble. Reading about it I felt it in my feet. Suspension bridge technology has been pushed forward by a ...”

“... substantial biographies of Jane Austen within a decade smacks of excess. But, compared with Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Jane Austen (1979) and John Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen (1984), the work under review is in so many ways the best that it deserves to make its mark. The three authors, moreover, approach their subject (or subjects) from ...”