“... one of the dogs (very likely rabid, according to the professor). ‘What’s in it?’ I ask, but David, my husband, refuses to commit himself. That’s what you get for marrying into the trade. How will I manage not to breathe the smoke? It’s everywhere. The burnt, dusty men who work the dump are unmoved by the arrival of a coach bringing well-dressed ...”

“... at MoMA again (until 14 May). At the time the show opened, Rivera was acknowledged, along with David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, as a leader of Mexican muralism, which was supported by the new government of Alvaro Obregón as a way to promote a transformed sense of Mexican identity through public art. This new identity would yoke an ...”

“... to Sabine Rewald, by two sepia drawings of his studio windows with the River Elbe beyond by Caspar David Friedrich. The drawings are exact in their rendering of casements, panes and the gradation of light on bare walls, and careful in their delineation of the distant riverbank. The frugal medium and the impersonal quality of the draughtsmanship give you the ...”

“... gestures into the music they write. There is an analogy to this situation, which the painter, David Hockney, was able to identify in an autobiographical anecdote. When Hockney was at art school and in the company of students busily mimicking the Abstract Expressionism that was new at the time, he found himself, with some unease, trying to accommodate ...”

“... settle for being remembered for what was said to them as opposed to what they said themselves. David Livingstone went through hell before arriving at Lake Tanganyika in October 1871, but his stories about that journey would never enter the language the way Stanley’s would, when he caught up with him at Ujiji. Fourteen years earlier Livingstone had given ...”

“... families. This budget helps hardworking people keep more of the money they have earned. His boss, David Cameron, criticising Labour in Parliament last month: They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain. The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hardworking taxpayers. The former Conservative ...”

“... discovered on coasts from Norway to the Mediterranean. It grows up to six centimetres long, has a brown or white shell and a speckled body that may range in colour from grey to orange. In sheltered bays, these molluscs settle into fine, soft mud or muddy sand, where they mate in undulant chains, half a dozen at once. When disturbed from their orgies, the ...”

“... to the detail of mossy roofs, leaves and branches is wonderful. There are pen and wash drawings on brown paper which bring to mind Ruskin’s Alpine landscapes. Ruskin praised him only once, but handsomely, in the 1846 edition of the first volume of Modern Painters, where he wrote that Palmer’s ‘studies of foreign foliage especially are beyond all praise ...”

“... the very occasional lack of response from the audience. He would sit there in his old raincoat and brown trilby, rocking slightly as he wove his ever more exuberant fantasies, on which, I have to admit, I looked less admiringly then than I do in retrospect. I had the spot in the show immediately following Peter’s monologue, which was scheduled to last five ...”

“... in Venice when El Greco first arrived there.The principal essay in the exhibition catalogue, by David Davies, is concerned to emphasise El Greco’s debt to the Counter-Reformation and to Spain. It explains how his subject-matter reflected the priorities of the Council of Trent – which is true of every artist working for Catholic patrons at that date ...”

“... to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking relish. Gossip has its charms, but not when it’s dragged out over three interminable evenings with animated postcard footage re-used to the point of ...”

“... exes are a hard-publishing lot. So far we have had diaries from two of its central figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, and from a spin-doctor hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his ...”

“... on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell and David Hume. He took a turn through French literature then doubled back to the English Romantics. He read Cicero and Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and ...”

“... David Foster Wallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of couple who read each other Ulysses in bed while holding hands. Jim read David and his younger sister Amy Moby-Dick as a bedtime story. It wasn’t inevitable that the boy would grow up to write an epic novel, but it wasn’t accidental ...”

“... Publishers seem to understand this, as witness a new Oxford edition of Horace’s Odes (1997) by David West, and a Penguin Aeneid from the same hand (1990), while A.J. Woodman’s edition of Tacitus’ Annals is eagerly awaited. But a Loeb edition is rather more: some volumes have full introductions and ample annotation, even a new critical text of the Latin ...”