“... him. We warm to his characters as little as they warm to one another. He revels in their flaws (David, in The Forgiven, whose accidental but culpable killing of a young Arab drives the plot, is thrillingly odious) and keeps them at a distance. Even the underdogs are too devious and grasping to be likeable. They know to be pak-wan, that is to flatter their ...”

“... a central theme in her work. They were thrown in two pieces, a process that she demonstrated to David Attenborough when he interviewed her in 1982 for a short BBC film. The film, which coincided with a retrospective of her work at the V&A, is on show at the exhibition and gives a flavour of Rie’s laconic, sour-sweet temperament. Her answers to his ...”

“... time, nothing much seemed to be happening, but then in January the lead counsel to the inquiry, David Barr KC, who has been plodding through the evidence since 2015, made a submission about the role of SDS’s senior management. He focused on a simple question: what was the justification, as understood at the outset, for the infiltration by undercover ...”

“... home, which faced the marketplace where his family were traders. I took a picture of my Star of David necklace against this backdrop, possessed by some primal, spiky urge to reinstate an ephemeral Jewish presence in this town which now has no Jewish community. I walked around the old synagogue, which has been converted into flats, but found no traces of its ...”

“... place are four Meko 140 frigates and four Meko 360 destroyers powered by Rolls-Royce engines, David Brown gearboxes and Decca navigation equipment: all made by us, though ordered before April 1982 after Cecil Parkinson, in his incarnation as Minister of State at the Board of Trade, had gone to Buenos Aires and eulogised the Junta for coping with their ...”

“... people saw in the ‘Yes’ campaign. Instead, they were trying to get things back to normal.When David Cameron emerged from 10 Downing Street after the referendum to announce a policy of ‘English votes for English laws’, the scales tipped. One of Bennie et al’s interviewees recalls that Cameron ‘thought Scotland was back in its box. We remembered ...”

“... alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental art, especially Cézanne, but they were able to develop their own work with an originality that weaker ...”

“... calm that followed the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993 had come to an end with the failure of Camp David, Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount and the subsequent Second Intifada. The artefacts could not safely be sent back to Gaza. In 2007 they made it as far as Geneva for an exhibition at the Musée d’art et d’histoire, Gaza at the ...”

“... only Rabelais, Flann O’Brien and Spike Milligan, but also – more surprisingly – the likes of David Nobbs, Ken Dodd and Les Dawson. (The middle part of the book consists of a kind of Flaubertian dictionary, a ‘Satie A-Z’, and it’s pleasing to note that of the two Leses on offer, Les Dawson has a much longer entry than Les Six.) Satie as a Gallic ...”

“... curling brush trails heading nowhere; wanton drips and splats: all this is not so far from what David Salle, the field leader of ‘postmodern’ painting, was then up to. One form of art-world good behaviour plays off against another: the springy triangular torque generated by the gardeners’ poses is a lesson learned from Old Master figure painting. We ...”

“... and Randolph Quirk) jostle with poets and novelists (including Medbh McGuckian and Amy Tan). David Dabydeen writes ‘On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, and discusses, in impeccably establishment English, a question that might just as well come under ‘Art’: how does a black writer in English find an authentic voice: what does s/he ...”

“... business: theirs was to pay and obey. Their leaders promised not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms ...”

“... have to hold my breath for fear of infecting the people who come near me.’ A view shared by David Gascoyne (with whom she was briefly in love, she nearly 40, he not yet 20), who wrote: ‘On the whole, I think her influence on the people she comes in contact with is bad ... There are very few who can stand the dazzling (but how depressing!) light of ...”

“... diary might not be quite a classic, but it becomes one in the hands of its exemplary editor David Vaisey, who has trimmed it to not much more than a third of its original length, and richly supplemented its information about the village’s inhabitants and about Turner’s family and business. In this way he quietly helps to substantiate the observation ...”

“... 1977. In that year, two contributors to a Times Literary Supplement survey, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, spoke so highly of her work as to effect a change in this situation. Three more novels by Barbara Pym were published, this time by Macmillan, who finally added to them in 1982 – two years after the writer had herself died – the book originally ...”