“... visitation complaints and defamation suits, and the answers have always been ‘it all depends.’ David Cressy’s excellent book suggests a different approach, examining conflicts over ritual and offering stories rather than statistics. Despite Coverdale, Gouge and the Admonition, a wedding was not only a religious ceremony, but the culmination of weeks or ...”

“... United States. He was shocked by American coffee, but calmly prepared for the MLA. ‘J’ai lu David Lodge,’ he boasted, brandishing his tattered copy of Small World. For the first time in 110 years, the MLA held its December meeting in balmy and palmy San Diego instead of frost-bitten Chicago, Toronto or New York. The San Diego convention centre is a ...”

“... measures that had effectively disenfranchised them. They were met by a phalanx of state troopers, wearing gas masks and brandishing truncheons, who ordered the marchers to disperse. Lewis and his followers stood their ground. The violent response of the troopers – Lewis was beaten unconscious – was captured on film, provoking widespread revulsion and ...”

“... to put people right about other people is incorrigible, indeed obsessional. In his review of David Cecil’s biography of Max Beerbohm Malcolm Muggeridge allowed it to be a graceful job of work, but said it missed the real point about Beerbohm and his lifestyle, which was that he concealed his Jewish origins and was a crypto-homosexual. Of ...”

“... and for ‘holy’ or ‘wise’. The echoes are fortuitous, but they are not unapt. For, as David Aberbach shows, Agnon was preoccupied throughout his writing career with the private sufferings of passive personalities, which he portrayed with a judicious and detached agnosticism. Commenting on the Hebrew meaning of Agnon, Aberbach concludes: ‘The ...”

“... was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.After leaving Satya, she moved into a flatshare with Armstrong in Boston. Her luminous ...”

“... nexus, in favour of Spartan purity. The unlikely father of the ‘white cube effect’ was Casper David Friedrich, whose studio’s one ornament was a T-square dangling from the wall, a reminder of honest German craftsmanship in keeping with his penchant for woodwork and frame-design. Of course, Friedrich’s brand of mystical pietism was partly responsible ...”

“... Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman hardly moves his eyes when he speaks – only his mouth. We see him wearing dark grey pyjamas, standing with the help of crutches, sinking glass after glass of whiskey. Taylor and Newman are playing a married couple who have become estranged and are living in a dysfunctional household preoccupied with the impending death of its ...”

“... car and he had on a respectable outfit – black pants and some kind of blouse – but he was also wearing a big, majestic belt with buckles and jewels and chains, as well as sunglasses. He was smoking a cigar. I met him at the car, and I walked up the walkway with him, and I just remember that feeling of walking next to him, holding his hand.After Elvis ...”

“... down the peninsula to Silicon Valley. A tall young black man held one corner of the banner; he was wearing a Ulysses T-shirt, as if analogue itself had come to protest against digital. The Brass Liberation Orchestra played Eurythmics’ ‘Sweet Dreams’ as the television cameras rolled. The white buses took up most of the four lanes of Eighth Street at ...”

“... had manifested.Behind me sat Jeannie, a Eucharistic mystic, and her Cajun ex-seminarian husband, David. (At the reception afterwards, in his lovely honk: ‘Best decision I ever made, to leave!’) The women’s heads were covered. Time had not passed. My younger sister, Mary, walked down the aisle in a sort of black sausage casing, as the wedding ...”

“... it be any more or any less improper to pay someone for handing over a photograph of Prince William wearing a bikini? The court cases were scarcely covered by the Fleet Street newspapers, save to complain that they were taking place at all (the Daily Mail described Elveden as ‘a disgraceful attempt by police and prosecutors to intimidate whistleblowers and ...”

“... having lived long enough to see another Conservative enter Downing Street. That prime minister, David Cameron, wanted to give her a full state funeral, putting her on the same level as Churchill. She vetoed the idea. So she was given a full ceremonial funeral instead, which placed her on a par with the Queen Mother and Princess Diana, though she received ...”

“... the press that Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ shortstop, a nice, inoffensive boy with cheekbones, the David Beckham of baseball, had promised him that ‘the ghosts would turn up eventually’. The Red Sox were at least spared the indignity of having their misfortunes blamed on some hapless idiot whose glove happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong ...”

“... of the Unfamiliar, and she could picture Dot touching the waves with an iron sceptre.’ Dot is wearing an ugly but ‘plantlike’ dress on which the other candidates for queenship are described as ‘feasting their eyes’. There has been a drought in the Argus region, and as Wallace puts it, ‘we needed a kind rain, a blessing rain.’ Dot contrives to ...”