“... Beckett, and none for John Berger, who was cool at first, then much warmer, coming under fire from David Sylvester – another S – for disparaging Giacometti’s work in the 1950s, and then for revising his opinion after the artist’s death in 1966. ‘Head of a Woman’ (1936) The first room contains a superb display of heads, dating from ...”

“... The index is on view in a chamber at the side of a magnificent crypt with a marble Star of David commemorating all six million who died in the Holocaust. The files are on loan from the state archives. A second site opened in 2012. It overlooks La Muette, a housing project in Drancy begun in the 1930s and still unfinished when it was requisitioned by ...”

“... as Earth Hour, or raising funds for forest restoration. Many are vegetarians, and they worship David Attenborough. On the other hand, they are addicted to overseas holidays, which leave a large carbon footprint; to online shopping (usually packed in several layers of bubblewrap) and takeaway food (packed in single-use plastic boxes); and to fast ...”

“... as a ‘humorous’ composer. In a piece on Morecambe and Wise in the LRB (15 April 1999, David Goldie quoted a story about André Previn appearing as a celebrity guest on the show. Beforehand Morecambe told Previn: ‘We must never think this is funny, on camera; never think it’s funny: we’re doing it for straight.’ Haydn would have approved of ...”

“... It was, after all, Escoffier who instructed his disciples, ‘Faites simple,’ and Elizabeth David who memorialised La Mère Poulard’s response to a Parisian restaurateur’s request for the secret of her famous omelettes at the Auberge de Saint-Michel Tête d’Or: ‘Voici la recette de l’omelette: je casse de bons œufs dans une terrine, je les ...”

“... and Scotland the more deeply felt his writing becomes. His examination of Northern poets such as David Morley, Simon Armitage and Sean O’Brien is marvellously sensitive to their regionalism and to the bitter undertow of history and class politics in some of their work. I have a grouse about both these books: neither has an index. Also, when reading ...”

“... excuse for befogging the reader. Montaillou was, last October, the subject of an attack by David Herlihy in Social History on the grounds of inaccurate handling of its source material. The specific accusation was of mistranslation from the Latin, and of the irrelevant introduction of material about incidents elsewhere. There is also the problem of ...”

“... comes into sight again when the ‘outstretched arms mechanically generated from each other’ in David’s ‘Oath of the Horatii’ are said to be (or at least have placed next to them, in apposition) ‘duplication which leads through democratic crowds to totalitarian unison’. I thought this was coming it a bit. There are only three outstretched arms in ...”

“... is Paramount Pictures Corporation, who are the work’s legal author. The noveliser is David Seltzer. Corporate authorship and versatile commercial exploitation are more systematic in the case of Star Wars. The film originated with George Lucas, credited on the title page with authorship of the novelisation (subsequent adventures of Luke Skywalker ...”

“... to the category of purely inventive or observant novelists, like Balzac or Dickens (setting aside David Copperfield). Plot invention, in particular, was never his forte: Le Rouge et le Noir derived from two separate causes célèbres, La Chartreuse from an untrustworthy 16th-century account of the youthful escapades of Pope Paul III, and Lucien Leuwen was ...”

“... accession. Bernard Bergonzi’s The Roman Persuasion is attended by so many coincidental links to David Lodge’s recent How far can you go? that to remark on them is almost unavoidable. By ‘links’ I don’t mean influence, for they are books of very different kinds, and I should surmise from internal evidence that Bergonzi’s was written earlier. They ...”

“... is not ornamental. It matters. In the review written in 2017 by the current foreign secretary, David Lammy, ‘into the treatment of, and outcomes for, Black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals in the criminal justice system’, Lammy writes that ‘juries deliberate as a group through open discussion. This both deters and exposes prejudice or ...”

“... The Language of Music – undertaken by three personal friends, Hazel Smalley and the composers David and Colin Matthews. In North America, that first and most important book of his has proved him what I have described as ‘one of our time’s two or three major analytic intellects’; I am indulging in this self-quotation because the present dust-jacket ...”

“... a pride of publishers, producers, stars and ancient European aristocrats – something like the David Frost Show done by Visconti. Everyone is beautiful except the gossip columnists, and they have all the appropriate faults, from kinky tastes in sex to bad spelling and worse usage: ‘But the daisy chain ... was only just gathering speed. It was still a ...”

“... in Professor Saddlemyer’s contribution to Irish Renaissance, edited by Robin Skelton and David Clark (Dolmen Press, 1965), but I suppose that volume is long out of print. So it is good to have all this material brought together, splendidly elucidated by Professor Saddlemyer’s notes. The new volume also incorporates the relevant matter from ...”