“... readers who enjoy a long book, but no one wants a big book as such. When in the 1960s the artist David Nash bought a chapel in Blaenau Ffestiniog, at the time the cheapest place in Britain to buy property, he befriended Phyllis Playter, who had lived there with John Cowper Powys. Her attempts to get Nash to read A Glastonbury Romance culminated in her taking ...”

“... front.) The magazine campaigned for the end of Israeli military rule, which with the support of David Ben-Gurion and his party Mapai (later the Labour Party), lasted for 18 years until 1966; it reported on Israeli military actions against Palestinian civilians, including the Qibya massacre in 1953 and the Kfar Qassem massacre in 1956; it published stories ...”

“... week – Bratby finished his studies at the Royal College of Art and, thanks to a famous essay by David Sylvester in Encounter, found himself at the head of a movement. ‘Everything but the kitchen sink? The kitchen sink too,’ Sylvester wrote to describe the work of Bratby and others – Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch, Jack Smith – who were busy ...”

“... to Hades – a detail I learned not from Briggs’s notes, but from an account of the poem by David Trotter.No doubt conscious of the fact that Paris has been reissued several times and failed to gain a wider readership, the new edition arrives with reinforcements. The Briggs commentary comes in at about three times the length of the poem ...”

“... like the only life left on the earth, all other plants having sent their sap below. Caspar David Friedrich’s Winter Landscape (1811), a version of which is currently on display at the Towner Gallery (until 22 January), shows a snowy post-sunset scene with a group of pine trees in the foreground, and the dark form of a distant cathedral just visible ...”

“... can only see so far: the maps give you an idea of what happened further off towards the horizon.David Bomberg was a fire-watcher in Kensington for much of the war, and was inspired by Piranesi’s etchings of the ruins of ancient Rome as he set about his charcoal drawings of London in 1944 and 1945. Nothing came of the topographical book he hoped to publish ...”

“... but the ship itself was realised by others. In Glasgow, John Robertson made the engine and David Napier the boiler, while John Wood in Port Glasgow built the wooden hull and installed the machinery. The result was a marvel, the prototype of a steamer fleet that would revolutionise travel on the Clyde by 1820, when two dozen of them sailed every day ...”

“... and lip-reading – is not obviously a bad mode of education for those not deaf at birth. The poet David Wright, deaf from scarlet fever at the age of seven, tells, in Deafness: A Personal Account, how glad he is to have been at that kind of school. The people on whom oralism worked had some experience of speech and seem also to have been intrinsically ...”

“... ego in the novel as an excerpt from his supposed poem dated 1860, ‘The Garden of Proserpine’. David West in the Times Saturday Review for 24 August 1991, show-casing the piece in a panel headed ‘Reading a Poem’, invited us to see here ‘many of the characteristics of the best Victorian verse: the vivid and disturbing pictures, the rich organ music ...”

“... or ‘one’ for ‘I’, wouldn’t make the needful point. In Looking at Giacometti, David Sylvester records a similar – though far more articulated – face-off with one of Giacometti’s lean and vertical female figures. And the effect here is not simply one of identification: I feel within my muscles the stance of the figure, feel I am ...”

“... Boswell on the occasion of needling his famous friend with the news that the atheist philosopher David Hume had died well and without repentance. ‘The horror of death, which I had always observed in Dr Johnson, appeared strong tonight.’ Sherwin Nuland a surgeon from Yale, speaks to the Johnson in each of us, to our hunger for knowledge of our inevitable ...”

“... What gave the work its wide currency, however, was the abridgment which, on his own initiative, David Somervell executed, bringing the gist of six volumes between the covers of a single (still substantial) book. As Toynbee came to acknowledge, ‘David Somervell did me an invaluable service in making cuts in my work I ...”

“... lists were drawn up of such notorious Communists or Communist sympathisers as Brian Walden, David Owen, Robert Mellish, John Stonehouse, Roy Hattersley and Reg Prentice; and even a bogus pamphlet on ‘revolutionary strategy’ for the installation of socialism in Britain was contrived for off-the-record briefing of American journalists, the joint ...”

“... of British imperialism had changed once more. To my mind, the most striking evidence for this is David Wilkie’s painting in 1838 of the Scottish general, Sir David Baird, discovering the corpse of Tipu Sultan of Mysore after the battle of Seringapatam. Back in the 1790s Tipu, as Bayly notes, had been the Indian ruler the ...”

“... figure in articles on the religious roots of Irish political ideologies (by Nicholas Canny and David Miller) and, rather incongruously, on the role of the potato in Irish demography (by K.H. Connell and L.M. Cullen). All four are seminal pieces, which have stimulated lively debates and further research. What gives most coherence to this ...”