“... gifted him with plenty money when he came out. In many ways it was a balanced life. Jokes like ‘David son of Joshua Son of Isaac son of Abraham O’Neil is in town and kiking everybody with big promises’ (to Ezra in 24) don’t have anything to do with it. I wrote terrific letters to bigots like Cardinal Spellman and Joe McCarthy and only regret I ...”

“... verse translations, a long biography of Haig, a short and oddly memorable study of the King David of the Bible, and one novel, Operation Heartbreak, about a clandestine war operation in which a body, purporting to be that of a British officer carrying secret documents, was dumped off the coast of Spain to deceive the Germans. As a singleton novel it is ...”

“... spontaneity, I hope, can be detected. The influential dialogues of our culture, from Plato’s to David Sylvester’s with Francis Bacon, have been the most conscientiously elaborated, while verbatim reporting essentially belongs to journalism. Robert Craft’s industry, dedication and literary skill not only make more palatable the two books under ...”

“... where he lapsed into a state of knee-knocking shock. Another Englishman, the Lancastrian David Lloyd, was hit a terrifying blow in the groin by Jeff Thomson. The following summer, I too hit him in the same region. I saw him later, ice packs clasped to his nether regions, and asked after his health. ‘After Thommo it were a pleasure,’ he ...”

“... that such facilities should be mothballed overnight. I have been reading Magnus Linklater and David Leigh’s book on the Westland affair.* One crucial passage, a quotation from an unnamed source, comes at the top of page 143: The Prime Minister knew about the leak. She was pleased it had been done. There was a meeting between Brittan and her after the ...”

“... my own – therefore very dear.’ On another occasion he remarks wryly, writing to his friend David Meldrum (7 January 1902), on how excellent his health is when he is producing inferior work. The last has been a disastrous year for me. I have wasted – not idled – it away, tinkering here, tinkering there – a little on Rescue, more on that fatal ...”

“... with whom she identifies. The secure sense of national identity came from her father: ‘David was an Adam,’ she wrote of him. ‘Australia was his prolific and innocent garden.’She was forty years away but always on the move, living (to put the places in roughly chronological order), in London, Paris, Spain, Hollywood, New ...”

“... and lions, with titles like ‘The Old Warrior’ (a lion, not a Masai). These are the work of David Shepherd and Simon Combes, who have donated reproduction fees to wild-life conservation funds. They are relevant to the text, in which the Baroness zestfully celebrates the beasts she killed, and also relevant to the tears of the moviegoers, enchanted by ...”

“... in Petrograd from Finland to trigger off the Revolution. A book recommended by many experts is David Shub’s Lenin: A Biography. It has much to recommend it, not least that Shub was a member of the Bolshevik Party in 1905 when Lenin was its leader and knew him and many other prominent actors in the Revolution very well. But few openings to a novel about ...”

“... no disturbing precocity as a schoolboy, no outward brilliance marking him out, as Russell and F.P. Ramsey were marked out in their earlier years. Mr Hodges includes photographs of seaside family holidays, redolent of their period and typical of a social class. He includes letters between Turing and a school friend to whom Turing was passionately ...”

“... of Thomas Gray, Allen Ramsay and Oliver Goldsmith, casually mentions that he does not need to read David Hume on miracles, and obliquely compares his own work with that of Milton? There is a paradox here: the more Bewick strove to establish his credentials as an artist, the more apparent it becomes that he was not the bon sauvage he was portrayed to ...”

“... cabinet-maker, and Zichec, in ‘Neighbour Rosicky’, 1928; Claude Wheeler and his war comrade, David Gerhardt, in One of Ours; Godfrey St Peter and Tom Outland in The Professor’s House; James Mockford and Clement Sebastian in Lucy Gayheart; the compatible and tragic Russian friends, Pavel and Peter, in My Antonia; the dead sculptor Harvey Merrick and ...”

“... can go to Galway if you make a case to me, you old sausage, just don’t get lost or overspend. David Mellor, the Guardian’s new arts columnist, will not be put to the trouble or embarrassment of contributing to such meetings. They have been discontinued. I know why, but would rather talk about the matter than write about it. Nobody – I hope – can ...”

“... function requires the articulation of that field to focus in the central vertical.’ David Rosand continues to elaborate this platitude, finally arriving at an absurd hyperbole: ‘What we might call the iconic imperative of the altarpiece enforces that centrality of focus; the lateral forces of the field operate centripetally, with reference to ...”

“... copy had been spiked pleaded to be granted at least ‘an E for Effort’, she got instead an ‘F for Fuck Off’. According to Shawcross, Murdoch loved this kind of thing until Establishment disapproval began to suggest to him that something nasty might be done to curb tabloid excesses by way of a change in the law. He then hosed down his over-ebullient ...”