“... knew the Old Testament. Upavon’s chapel is called the Cave of Adullam, the stronghold where David sought refuge from Saul’s armies (1 Samuel), presumably as a reminder of the persecution suffered by dissenters; Little Zoar, near Calne, is evidence of the fortress mentality of those strict Calvinists among the Baptists who believed that only the Elect ...”

“... In​ David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the Kinnock-like party leader, George Jones, is a tragic figure. His wit, his passion and his ability to extemporise are gradually extinguished, with his connivance, by a party machine that spends its time trying to out-Tory the Tories. They obey the polls religiously, yet still the voters aren’t ‘churning ...”

“... become friendly and perhaps sexually involved with a couple of Danish lesbians, one of whom, Marie David, successfully sued Strindberg for assault. Not much later he married the 20-year-old Austrian journalist Frida Uhl. It was a marriage he’d drifted into, but at first it was happy enough, except for the wedding night, when he tried to strangle ...”

“... years in the mid-19th century a group of British explorers – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker (with his wife, Florence), Henry Morton Stanley and James Grant – slogged out on their respective expeditions through East and Central Africa, and engaged in an intense and bitter battle over who exactly could claim to have ...”

“... it is elevated to a sublime combination of nature and architecture, as if painted by Caspar David Friedrich, or by Pückler’s friend Friedrich Schinkel, then the leading architect in Berlin: standing in that allée of ivy-clad columns … you see them recede in perspective until they come together three hundred feet ahead of you, terminating in a ...”

“... that quoted respectful comments by American writers and historians, including Justin Kaplan and David Levering Lewis, who had participated in literary gatherings Mrs Bush initiated at the White House. Sittenfeld identified strongly with the portrayal of Laura Bush as a ‘voracious reader of fiction’, whose favourite novel was The Brothers Karamazov. And ...”

“... increment or economic rent and hand it to the community whose enterprise had driven up values. David Lloyd George tried it in his People’s Budget of 1909, in part in response to the fiscal difficulties created by the cost of old age pensions. It failed, and was abandoned after the First World War. But the idea of rent was taken up by Webb, who, at the ...”

“... Deleuze’s book is on the work of Francis Bacon it is certainly not so in the same way that, say, David Sylvester’s Looking Back at Francis Bacon is. Yet it does contain moments of looking that prompt me to see Bacon’s art in new ways. I was most struck by the fourth chapter, entitled ‘Body, Meat and Spirit, Becoming-Animal’, where Deleuze ...”

“... to its masters in big business. Any minister who for a moment threatened the corporations – David Clark on freedom of information, Nigel Griffiths on consumer influence, Mark Fisher on the arts – has been summarily sacked. Meanwhile, corporation tax and capital gains tax have been cut to ribbons, but income tax has stayed the same. The theoretical ...”

“... it wasn’t altogether surprising that another gate opened, courtesy of Maurice Bowra and Lord David Cecil, to a fellowship at Oxford. The only begetter of the study of literary theory at Oxford, he became the subject’s best-known teacher there, the leading authority in the field in Britain, and one of its most acclaimed proponents in the world ...”

“... But in his own eyes he remained the gangling, untidy public school rebel, still recognisable in David Hockney’s official portrait of him as Provost. ‘Quirky, unpredictable, a believer that truth emerges from contradiction, a roughneck in argument’, according to Noel Annan, his predecessor as Provost of King’s. His friend Audrey Richards said that he ...”

“... into an altruistic triangle ending in marriage; Agnes’s benign relation to Dora is the crux of David Copperfield; Lucy Snowe in Villette is seen isolating herself through her resistance to desire for or friendship with women; Pip in Great Expectations is the feminised child or doll in the cruel triad of Estella/Pip/Miss Havisham; and Trollope (punitively ...”

“... buses, working on building sites or sitting in their own kitchens or living-rooms. Many, like David McQuillan, Winston McCaughey, Ritchie Latimer, Albert Beacom, Robert Bennett, Thomas Loughran and James McFall were with their children when they were attacked. William Gordon’s 10-year-old-daughter, Lesley, and seven-year-old son, Richard, were beside ...”

“... subscribing to le dernier cri from Europe’. Rothko dominates an essay in the Hopper catalogue by David Anfam, the author of the Rothko catalogue raisonné, who notes that ‘so much has been written about Edward Hopper that perhaps one of the few remaining royal roads by which to approach him is via another massively interpreted artist.’ Anfam makes the ...”

“... and shits in America’. The group included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. In August 1944, Carr stabbed and killed Kammerer. Near the end of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a lightly fictionalised and surprisingly engaging account of the murder and of the months leading up to it, written in 1945 by Kerouac and ...”