“... un-compelling. It’s not simply that the characters are one-dimensional; the characters in David Lodge’s campus novels may be one-dimensional but they are invested with buoyancy and a sense of inner propulsion. Moo, on the other hand, reads as though it had been plotted on a chart. The oddity is that one feels that Smiley could, if she wanted ...”

“... with the censor. In this struggle, writers portrayed themselves with sly disingenuousness as David confronting Goliath. In reality, most writers believed that they, and not the state, would have the last word. And so it has proved. Ben Jonson’s lines are apposite: Nor do they aught, that use this cruelty Of interdiction, and this rage of burning; But ...”

“... Then, on the basis of various points on this line, we are to construct a hexagram (a Star of David) inside a circle, which patterns the space at the top of the painting between one sitter and the other. Then, we are to observe that a horoscope square (the skeleton of a ‘geniture’, or birth-prediction of someone’s fortune) fits handily over the ...”

“... garlic, and John Minton’s seductive, and faintly Post-Impressionist, illustrations to Elizabeth David. Brooke, after the war, heads for the Mediterranean as fast as he possibly can, but, being Brooke, he is already deeply nostalgic for his Army days there and strives to reanimate certain epiphanic moments – with no success whatever. In his largely ...”

“... itself in many ways a grand pastiche: a de luxe effort of style. As Jan Morris and, more recently, David Cannadine have argued, the British elicited respect from their subjects abroad by spectacle as well as by force, exporting to their various dominions a home-grown instinct for pomp and ceremony, inflected with local colour to produce in each country a ...”

“... cut to the same mould, all three buttons invariably buttoned. A short film about them, directed by David Zilkha and shown at Edinburgh in 1996, was appropriately entitled Normal Conservative Rebels. That G–G are at the same time photographers and principal subjects obviates, as with Cindy Sherman’s pictures, any sense of exploitation, so often an aspect of ...”

“... and not simply about members of religious orders: Benedictines do not seem to suffer from it. David Knowles wrote a history of the monks and friars in medieval England that was instantly recognised as a masterpiece, but I can’t quite see a Jesuit pulling off something similar – though on a smaller scale John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits ...”

“... the doctrines of geology) was said to signal the nearness of the end. Cumming thought David Hume was the arch-frog that creeps from the mouth of the dragon in the Book of Revelation; and geologists were the offspring of the frog. Benton is at considerable pains to show that his particular disaster is the ‘big one’, ‘the greatest catastrophe ...”

“... identified as the major obstacle in the way of Zionist fulfilment in the late 19th century, and David Ben-Gurion said in December 1947 that ‘there can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 per cent.’ Israel, he warned on the same occasion, would have to deal with this ‘severe’ problem with ‘a new ...”

“... or even standing. Ann Widdecombe is now out of the race but, like her, Iain Duncan Smith and David Davis would be good leaders for a further spell in the wilderness, as would the old Michael Portillo. But evidently the new model Portillo would be second best only to Clarke as the leader of an overdue Conservative revival. The trouble is that, not merely ...”

“... Rather than a ‘narrator’, however, it might make sense to speak of the book having, as David Hayman has suggested of Ulysses, an ‘Arranger’ – ‘something between a persona and a function, somewhere between the narrator and the implied author’. This isn’t an entirely gratuitous comparison: Emerald Germs of Ireland is a more Joycean book ...”

“... English was no good: ‘His poems written in pure English . . . seldom rise above mediocrity,’ David Irving wrote in 1800, in his influential Lives of Scottish Authors. The prevailing view of Fergusson’s English work is well summarised by Susan Manning, in the best essay in Crawford’s volume, as ‘nugatory apprenticework’. Her view is that ‘our ...”

“... of England series and to the publications of a few academics, notably Malcolm Baker and the late David Bindman. In a recent conference at the V&A, several foreign research students gave excellent papers on little-known sculptural masterpieces in English churches. There was no greater portrait statue erected in 18th-century Europe than Louis-François ...”

“... unstable relationship with race.The show opens with two large flags hanging from the ceiling. David Hammons’s African American Flag (1990) hangs behind Chris Ofili’s Black British version; both recast symbols of empire and the nation-state in the colours of Pan-Africanism: red, black and green. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois wrote ...”

“... his 35 years at Netherne. This led me, some months later, to an office in Lambeth belonging to David O’Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals, and chair of the Adamson Collection Trust. We walked up and down the corridors of the clinic where he worked and looked at the display of patients’ pictures on the walls (these ...”