“... the street, the motorway. To her the hospital is this squashed pillow, this water glass: this bell pull, and the nice judgment required to know when to use it. For the visitor everything points outwards, to the release at the end of the visiting hour, and to the patient everything points inwards, and the furthest extension of her consciousness is not the ...”

“... efforts amounted to little more than a publicity vehicle for figures such as the Klansman David Duke and Green Beret vigilante Bo Gritz. In a bout of white power infighting, the neo-Nazi factions of the white power movement hounded Carto as a swindler of right-wing funds, and a ‘swarthy’ man of questionable racial make-up. The second seriously ...”

“... Hugo, ‘The Dying of a Long Lost Lover’, ‘Hill of the Bees’, ‘A Myth Enacted’, ‘Slow Bell from the High Hill’, ‘John Hunter’s Canal’, ‘The Lawn of Trees and Rocks’, ‘Quelle Histoire’, and (an unusual exertion of sympathy) ‘Dulled Son of Man’. In a poem to Ivor Gurney, Grigson, who can sometimes be magnanimous to the ...”

“... into her bed, and stayed there for the next 22 years. One day​ in 1911, walking with Gertrude Bell, Arthur Benson mentioned to her that the composer Ethel Smyth had once said his mother was ‘as good as God and as clever as the Devil’. She laughed ‘at the profanity of it’, replying: ‘That’s one comfort about all of you – you are not in the ...”

“... been dismissed. In 1937 the Nazis staged the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. (Salomon, David Foenkinos imagines in his novel, ‘positions herself on the side of the despised artists’.) In 1938, she submitted a piece for an anonymous fine arts competition; having picked it as the winner, the jury panicked when they discovered it was by a Jewish ...”

“... just get on with the job. 31 March. Jehovah’s Witnesses blitz the street and when they ring the bell I lie low until the coast is clear. I imagine they’re used to this sort of response and even when someone is unwary enough to open them the door the exchange is generally pretty curt. In one house in the street, though, they are assured of a warmer ...”

“... Such donnish tolerance was rare. The most ferocious analyst of his immaturity was probably David Holbrook, whose account of Thomas’s ‘infantile egocentricity’ in Llareggub Revisited (1962) represents a high-water mark of Leavisite moralism. Thomas shows ‘an impotence of language belonging to an impotence in living’, Holbrook said, and quoted ...”

“... or directed or narrated by people with a background in business or an interest in business think. David Brailsford, the general manager of Team Sky and the performance director of British Cycling – and therefore the man behind Britain’s eight gold medals in cycling at London 2012 and the Tour de France victories of Wiggins and Froome – studied sports ...”

“... sentiment in Liverpool. But there were more Leylands than Roscoes, and not just because, as David Eltis reminds us in his deeply researched new book, slavery was accepted across most of the early modern world. No one wanted to be a slave, except when the alternative was being executed after a battle, or made a human sacrifice, but the institution was ...”

“... Hopkins; and though Steegmuller did write some fiction – including mysteries under the name of David Keith – it’s a fair bet that Davis is the best fiction writer ever to translate the novel. Which suggests a further question to the opening list: would you rather have your great novel translated by a good writer or a less good one? This is not as idle ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... their cell phones. ‘M. Bizimungu doesn’t want to see anybody!’ But I’d already rung the bell. Pasteur Bizimungu shoots out and welcomes me. ‘Yes, I want to see him, absolutely!’ he tells the soldiers and whisks me inside. He locks the door and leans against it, breathing heavily. A volley of accusations about Kagame follow; I remember the ...”

“... walk into a bookshop in Paris, Berlin or Madrid stocked with translations of Baldwin, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, David Graeber and other messengers from an alternative American future.We are​ very far from that future. Instead Trump and company seem bent on returning to 19th-century gunboat diplomacy, invoking the threat of ...”

“... his 35 years at Netherne. This led me, some months later, to an office in Lambeth belonging to David O’Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals, and chair of the Adamson Collection Trust. We walked up and down the corridors of the clinic where he worked and looked at the display of patients’ pictures on the walls (these ...”

“... Wernher von Braun used an alcohol-liquid oxygen combination. His engine was a huge hardened bell crowned with multiple fuel injectors, and a rising unsymmetrical coil of steel rigatoni: the pipes for the separate fuel and oxidant pumping systems plaited together to fit inside the ‘clever shape’ of the V2 body. It is ugly in more ways than one, when ...”