“... not a lot. He had a thin moustache, an air of suave indifference borrowed from Fred Astaire or David Niven, and he was interested in any woman who wasn’t my mother.’ Both fathers drive at 105 mph singing ‘Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today,’ and both leave home to get some milk, returning weeks later with a bottle in each hand and ...”

“... bath-chair, the girl clean-run like a salmon, the best shot in England after His Majesty. In 1975, David Daniell published a book of criticism, nicely entitled (from Bunyan) The Interpreter’s House. This work was for John Buchan’s besieged supporters like the scraps of burning straw blown by the wind over the flooded dykes as the Dutch fleet sailed to the ...”

“... of The Child in Time, for example, Ian McEwan lists Christina Hardyment’s Dream Babies, David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order and Joseph Chilton Pearce’s Magical Child. In Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis acknowledges, among a number of others, Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, Lawrence Shainberg’s Brain Surgeon and ‘the works of ...”

“... in Québec than in the rest of Canada. But Canada has laws against overt anti-semitism (if David Irving lived in Canada he would probably be convicted of promoting racial hatred); and all the significant convictions under these laws have been in provinces other than Québec. To prove his point, Richler would have to show that anti-semitism is inherent ...”

“... Somalis. I don’t hear my first bullet in Mogadishu until late afternoon. I’m standing with David Shearer, field director of the Save the Children Fund, on the flat roof of the SCF staff house, hardly troubled by the thought that we’re both crisply silhouetted against the skyline. At the report, I flinch – no, I jump. I look at Shearer and see that ...”

“... be the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel. He also asked for a face-to-face meeting with David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, in order to break the deadlock in the negotiations. Ben-Gurion refused to meet with Zaim. He insisted that the Syrians withdraw their forces from the patch of land they had captured in Palestine and sign an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the theatre of a state opening of Parliament, featuring such kenspeckle figures as ‘Sir David Frost arriving to exchange a word with his father-in-law, the Duke of Norfolk and Earl Marshal’, and the Earl Marshal pointing out the patriotic wall paintings to his French guests and saying: ‘Vous voyez? Agincourt. Autre victoire pour nous. Victoire ...”

“... Killer. A white man scalped. A white man disappeared, a white boy kidnapped. It was Biblical, David v. Goliath. But Wilson was disturbed by that.’ It’s a way of writing that recalls the staccato beat of three-dot journalism, and Alexie’s reliance on it suggests that he is trying to put everything simply and clearly, so that readers don’t make the ...”

“... ministers scurried into the City to seek out millionaires to conduct the Government’s business: David Simon from BP, Martin Taylor from Barclays Bank, Peter Davis from the Pru, even that devoted Thatcherite Alan Sugar of Tottenham Hotspur. Past Labour Governments had made some small effort to assert their democratic rights over unelected financial power. In ...”

“... disaster. With Freud and the existentialists, tragedy continues to colonise philosophy, as David Kornhaber points out. In a fluid, fragmented culture hostile to boundaries, the tragic is a question of hybridised modes, recycled spaces, meta-theatre, and performances where Antigone sits on your knee, stifling inside a sack, if you have the misfortune to ...”

“... and soundscape appears in several of her compatriots’ work, in the poetry of Grace Nichols and David Dabydeen, and, especially, in the fiction of Wilson Harris. (I once invited Harris, a long-time resident of Chelmsford, to talk about what it was like to live in Essex: he wrote back to say that he had no idea – his mind was always in Guyana.)Gilroy’s ...”

“... greeted the last major Wilson exhibition, Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction, curated by David Solkin, now of the Courtauld Institute, certainly the best, and probably the most respected, historian of 18th-century British art now practising. In the introduction to his excellent and, as it turned out, controversial catalogue, Solkin had suggested that ...”

“... literary company. Between the lines, you glimpse a lovable character bursting with curiosity: a David Attenborough of the cultural world, taking pleasure in every manifestation of symbolic activity from the humblest to the most magnificent. (He even embraced some snarky barbs directed at him by Heidegger and his students.) This congenial impression is ...”