“... Kuper zooms in for a closer look, he selects areas already well investigated. If you’ve read David Newsome, Annan himself, Michael Holroyd and Hermione Lee on the Wilberforces, Leslie Stephen, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, you’re likely to know what’s coming before you’ve turned the page – and there’s a limit to the appeal even of Clapham ...”

“... republican critics upbraided the Provos for adopting the policies of their former rivals, while David Trimble had two former Officials – Eoghan Harris and Paul Bew – as advisers. There is a great deal in their theory and practice that can be left to gather dust; yet politics in Ireland could use a bit of the utopian energy and optimism with which the ...”

“... decision the Scottish government established a group of experts under the chairmanship of Sir David Edward to examine the UK Supreme Court’s jurisdiction in Scottish criminal appeals. The experts favoured continuation of the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. Irritated, the SNP set up a further review group under the chairmanship of Lord ...”

“... and history, wore nail polish and borrowed his sister’s fun-fur jacket. He took Deborah to hear David Bowie and Lou Reed, and read her Oscar Wilde, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. He showed her a ring binder containing sections labelled ‘Lyrics’ and ‘Novel’. ‘I felt privileged that he had trusted me enough to let me see the extent of his ...”

“... schools. In their collection of essays on 12th-century Latin, The Tongue of the Fathers (1998), David Townsend and Andrew Taylor confirmed Ong’s insight. Latin discourse, they wrote, ‘endlessly replicates tradition. It upholds a monological and orthodox consensus … To enter into this language is, par excellence, to enter into patriarchy. Medieval ...”

“... explanation of the gunfire and cancelled the visit. The departing American commander, General David Petraeus, keeps saying that the fall in violence and the extension of government control in Iraq is ‘fragile and reversible’. His caution is based on experience. In 2004 Petraeus, then commander of the 101st Airborne Division, appeared to have pacified ...”

“... Cowdrey let him down. When the MCC’s handling of the affair provoked a members’ revolt, led by David Sheppard and Mike Brearley, this, Oborne claims, ‘put the wind up’ Cowdrey, who clearly wanted to placate everybody. In the end, oddly, Cowdrey took D’Oliveira to Alec Douglas-Home’s London flat, where Home told him to stick to cricket and let ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... self appears in ‘Farewell Performance’, where he describes scattering the ashes of his friend David Kalstone: Now, in the furnace parched to ten or twelve light handfuls, a mortal gravel sifted through fingers, coarse yet greyly glimmering sublimate of palace days, Strauss, Sidney, the lover’s plaintive ‘Can’t we be just be friends?’ which your ...”

“... Americans seem to relish Presidential biographies. David McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker ...”

“... a few names of those he calls ‘the true heroes of [his] story’, such as Alain Connes and David Finkelstein. The fact is that the third road is not yet sufficiently well trodden to lend itself to popular exposition. If there are no points in space-time, what does this imply about the nature of time in quantum gravity? To some, including Julian Barbour ...”

“... riddle of the finches was only solved more than a century after Darwin’s visit to the Galapagos. David Lack, then a schoolteacher, studied the birds in 1938-39, and in 1947 published his influential Darwin’s Finches, in which he laid out the details of the finches’ adaptive radiation, and emphasised the importance of competition between similar species ...”

“... of military tribunals recently disposed of its first case. The defendant was the Australian David Hicks, held at Guantánamo Bay since his capture in Afghanistan in late 2001. For five years it had been said that he had aided the enemy, conspired to wage war crimes, and attempted murder, but when he appeared in court on 1 March this year, a stroke of ...”

“... opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since The Child ...”