“... who, initially at least, brought to it the same benevolent rule as editor-proprietor that David Astor exercised on the Observer. It was at this stage that Inglis was lucky enough to join it – having leapt on board from the Daily Sketch, where the tone was a good deal more robust, or thuggish. If still a conservative paper, the Spectator was even by ...”

“... us, by his defeat at the Socratic Club.It is difficult to know what to make of Lewis, whom Lord David Cecil declared to be ‘a great man’, yet who seems to have had only a minimal self-knowledge and who had a capacity for getting things ‘plumb wrong’ in human relationships. It was certainly a man of unusual talent who produced some sixty ...”

“... for the family firm, fundamentally different characters. The wonder, however, is not that ‘David’ should have turned out badly but that ‘Bertie’ should have turned out so well. (There were two more brothers, ‘Harry’ of Gloucester and George of Kent, whose capacity for kingship, had the succession moved further down the line, was for different ...”

“... are translated as follows: ‘and they put to death the Leader of the Community, the Bran[ch of David ...] / and with woundings, and the (high) priest will command.’ The verb rendered as ‘woundings’ might be cognate with the verb meaning ‘to pierce’ that occurs in the Suffering Servant passage of Deutero-Isaiah, and Eisenman and Wise are happy to ...”

“... literary critics are going to have to come to some accommodation with Burke; at the very least, as David Bromwich proposes in quite another context, they may have to embrace a Burkean language but wrest it to non-Burkean ends. This means that the relationship with ‘New Historicism’ and its marxisant traditions will inevitably be uneasy. When Harrison ...”

“... Auster: his ex-wife is Delia (Auster’s Lydia), his present Iris (Auster’s Siri); his son is David (Auster’s Daniel), his daughter Sonia (Auster’s Sophie). Even the dates seem to correspond. At the front, indeed, ‘the author extends special thanks to Sophie Calle for permission to mingle fact with fiction’. This teasing game plays dangerously on ...”

“... should have known better’ becomes a somewhat wearisome refrain. Hospital administrator David Jacobson ‘worked out his own reasons why he was not at risk ... he was fulfilling a worthwhile function which was appreciated by the Lebanese’; Frank Reed ‘felt he was safe because he was married to a Lebanese’; Jo Cicippio ‘thought he was safe so ...”

“... know this is a big movie, no skimpy, fake-ass wannabe shit.’ Lee’s idea of a big movie is David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia or Bridge over the River Kwai. He is also a great admirer of Oliver Stone’s JFK. Later we get a better look at Shorty and Malcolm in their immaculate zoot-suits, long coats, baggy pants tight at the ankles, broad-brimmed hats ...”

“... Bagehot remarked of the House of Lords that anyone who had a high opinion of its contribution to the governance of Britain should go and have a look at it. He clearly believed that the mere sight of the so-called Upper House at work would cure any tendency towards excessive reverence. He had sound reasons for this judgment, since the outstanding feature of the Victorian House of Lords was, in a word, absenteeism ...”

“... with it was totally out of the question. He even adopted the Israeli position towards the Camp David accords, stating that he would ‘continue to support the process as long as Israel sees utility in it.’ This undiluted ‘Israel first’ policy encouraged Israel to persist in its diplomatic intransigence just when her Arab neighbours seemed prepared to ...”

“... contemporaries. But they were not left to be admired – except in details like the rock the David stands on, where rusticity was appropriate. Rodin’s way of leaving figures half in and half out of the block, and letting the lines show where piece-moulds joined on bronzes, was evidence of his tenderness for the unfinished state – but these things can ...”

“... rather like reports from less-than-overwhelmed referees. Asa Briggs is dismissed in a few lines; David Landes is damned with the faint praise of ‘considerable literary skills and a certain old-fashioned rhetoric’; and Lord Dacre is rapped on the knuckles for failing to write a big book on the Enlightenment. Such comments are more revealing of their ...”

“... be a widow in the next.’ It is a warning that has too often been ignored – and not only by the David Jenkinses and the Spacely-Trellises of today’s Ecclesia Anglicana. For they, too, of course, had their predecessors. The Bishop of London who declared at the outbreak of war in 1914, ‘This is the greatest fight ever made for the Christian Religion – a ...”

“... If it’s December 1941 in Casablanca,’ Humphrey Bogart moodily asks in a famous movie, ‘what time is it in New York?’ The answer is not as obvious as it looks. Time, especially political time, has snags, hitches, runs; lags behind in some places, suddenly catches up. Reading translations, which have often travelled to us across all kinds of odd delays, we could do worse than adapt Bogart’s question to our texts ...”

“... into the nether regions is frequently heroic and, in achieving it, he is ennobled but emasculated. David Goodis is the laureate of this mood. William Kennedy, a more recent mythologist of hobo as artist, has seen his novel Ironweed make it all the way to the screen, where Jack Nicholson was obliged to continue his career-long impersonation of the damaged but ...”