“... asked. How precisely had he obtained his discharge? Was it true that he had murdered the ship’s cook?’ There were also rumours – Freud blamed Spender for spreading them – that, after this stint, he avoided being conscripted because he couldn’t handle being separated from his cat. ‘Stephen always embroidered. That’s how it got about. My strength ...”

“... is not Consequences but a cookbook compiled (loose word, since she merely instructed the palace cook to cough up some recipes) by the maharajah’s aunt. The Elysian – and this makes it unique among book prizes – seems not to stipulate that it is a prize for published books. The discussion of the judges’ panel in the book revolves around the question ...”

“... into the reading room.’ And it’s used defensively, to protect her privacy. ‘Have written to David Godwin pretending not to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the ...”

“... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...”

“... of 16, which is unremarkable except that next to Hübner (and also in the Volkssturm) is Peter Cook. He is looking at Goebbels with the ghost of a smile and is much as he was around 1970, his face angular and handsome which it was before the drink took hold. Perhaps to someone who hadn’t known him the resemblance would seem less remarkable. To me it’s ...”

“... ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background’, followed by a plain grilled loup and no ...”

“... his presciently titled book (Bush had not yet loosed his thunderbolt when the MS was completed), David Victor of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, calls it ‘the Kyoto fantasyland’, and in retrospect there was never a chance of a workable agreement. But the Kyoto delegates believed they had two precedents to hearten them. In 1985 Joe ...”

“... often surprises us, and Nazneen even more so, in small ways – he has a driving licence, he can cook – which hint at the possibility that he once had a life before marriage, and that living in a high-rise in Tower Hamlets takes its toll on men as much as women. Chanu rarely loses heart, however, as we see most memorably in an account of a day trip to ...”

“... and roadless places, and corruption and incompetence galore. The current conservative senator, David Vitter, has been mixed up with prostitutes while preaching family values; the Democratic congressman from New Orleans had to resign after he was found to have an unexplained $90,000 in his freezer (in an interesting twist, the disarray he created in the ...”

“... of white women.’Black feminists weren’t the only ones to take offence. In 1986 the novelist David Bradley confessed that the first time he read Native Son,I shed no tears for Bigger. I wanted him dead; by legal means if possible, by lynching if necessary … I did not see Bigger Thomas as a symbol of any kind of black man. To me he was a sociopath, pure ...”

“... to brainstorm ideas to save the club. Kempster was on holiday, so the owner and boss of Chestnut, David Newton, sat in for him. Newton – who was not a Bostonian, or a Boston United supporter – said later that he experienced a sentimental epiphany. ‘I sat there with a lump in my throat,’ Newton told the Boston Standard. ‘I spent the rest of the day ...”

“... I came in the latter category. I went round to see him after Home and he said how much he liked David Storey. ‘He’s the ideal author … never says a word!’ In Chariots of Fire he shared a scene with Lindsay Anderson, both of them playing Cambridge dons. Lindsay was uncharacteristically nervous but having directed John G. in Home felt able to ask his ...”

“... and the final natural but charged image that gives the poem its conclusion and title.’ As David Kalstone pointed out in Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, however, the poem was not simply a homage to Bishop and her work, but a way of using her tone and then moving away from it, a way of separating himself from her ...”

“... one of the MPs who has taken the topic up at Parliamentary level is an antiabortion campaigner, David Alton. The stories the Romans told about the Christians have often been attributed to misunderstandings about theology, specifically, about the nature of the Eucharist. But Christian imagery, divorced from its conventional context, is startling: Abraham and ...”

“... December. S. and I had just moved into a new house. Her sister came to stay. A friend came over to cook us coq au vin; he was in our kitchen for hours. I went to the pub with my family, and stood close to strangers at the bar. Nobody was masked. I watched the highlights of the Liverpool-Everton game. Tens of thousands of people roared from the terraces. We ...”