“... get carried away beyond the merits of an originally sound case. Why, he goes on, do writers like David Pryce-Jones want the Parisians to have behaved like the people of Warsaw? It is certainly true that, as a result of their rising, the inhabitants of Warsaw managed to get their city largely razed to the ground. If Hitler ...”

“... despised abroad and at home, this crowing may prove not to have been the wisest of moves. David Kelly’s decision to take his own life on 17 July 2003 produced a wave of public revulsion against the government, and against the prime minister in particular. It could have seemed a relatively minor event – the sad death of an eminent public servant ...”

“... Rotten or Sid Vicious, eclipsing the group’s musical muscle: drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock. (It was Matlock who wrote nearly all the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial precursor in grasping that bad ...”

“... pious persons Zeus is the name for what order would look like if there was an order. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, in the notes to his translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, says it is important for ancient Greek worshippers to get the name of the god right, ‘otherwise he may not hear or may not listen.’ And Lloyd-Jones’s ...”

“... would explore’. The hostile responses that the book provoked when it was published, and which David Cronenberg’s film version reanimated 25 years later, are on this view further evidence of its deep ‘psychological and emotional truth’. The only possible explanation for such fiercely negative reactions, Ballard says, is denial: it’s the classic ...”

“... yourself in – is displaced or obscured by it. Some people found it charming. I think Adam Mars-Jones put it unanswerably in his review when he said: ‘Adam Thirlwell has simply underestimated the amount of charm needed to make good what he has subtracted from the pleasures of reading.’ And this simple mistake of arithmetic also applies to Kapow! It is ...”

“... a leisurely luxury, and early writing about the epidemic was raw testimony, often from people like David Wojnarowicz who knew they didn’t have the time for subtlety, fighting rhetoric with rhetoric by diagnosing a disease whose symptoms were ‘sweating palms, angry outbursts, hysteria, the discharging of handguns’.* Even journalism struggled to keep up ...”

“... before Wimbledon and other prized parts of the output go the way of the Premier League and Sir David Attenborough onto better financed channels. That’s not the only difficulty. It is generally reckoned that if the BBC is to justify being the beneficiary of a poll tax, the BBC needs to reach at least 90 per cent of the UK audience, although there is a bit ...”

“... court of Lorraine, at Lunéville. She was fat, looking in her portrait by Tocqué a little like David Hume (her friends called her ‘La Grosse’); also hopelessly disorganised, full of neurasthenic aches and pains, and a great groaner and complainer – but this last somehow in a companionable fashion, showing she was as interested in ...”

“... into my barn’ (Matthew 13, 30). Religious language with a different resonance is deployed by David Halperin in his Saint Foucault, which bears the subtitle ‘Towards a Gay Hagiography’. Halperin is well aware of the dangerous echo of Saint Genet, Sartre’s overbearing and invasive gloss on another writer’s life and work, but appropriates another ...”

“... a genre requirement that the central figures of novels be positive in their temperaments: David Lurie in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, for instance, is stubborn and curmudgeonly, with a streak of self-sabotage a mile wide. It isn’t even a requirement that they be sane, as shown not only by Nabokov’s Kinbote but by the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s ...”

“... to the Indian population, though often through the efforts of Indian doctors and philanthropists. David Arnold’s book covers the early 19th century in greater detail and includes a chapter on the anguished responses to the first cholera pandemic of 1818-25. He provides fascinating material on the period when Europeans were trying to come to grips with ...”

“... figure eventually has to let him go, triggering a suicidal binge. Although largely a creation of David O. Selznick, a producer with a predilection for sentimental narratives, What Price Hollywood? draws on the career and decline into alcoholism of the silent era director Lowell Sherman, who himself plays the dissipated drunkard Maximillian Cady. Cady and his ...”

“... ambitions for them, rather than writing whatever would please current theatrical fashions. Emrys Jones has pointed out in The Origins of Shakespeare that the 16th century was the period of a Humanist ‘educational revolution’ which generated immense intellectual excitement and produced a heightened political and historical consciousness from the renewed ...”

“... admired as a great prophet, and whose work is quite unreadable today); the ‘manifestly insane’ Jones Very (who considered himself the ‘new born bard of the Holy Ghost’, and who went around baptising people until he made the ‘tactical error’ of trying to baptise several Salem ministers who promptly had him put in an asylum for a month); and Henry ...”