“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... them from talking about ‘the moral landscape’, fMRI studies aren’t taken very seriously. As David Eagleman writes in his recent book Incognito, ‘imaging methods make use of highly processed blood-flow signals, which cover tens of cubic millimetres of brain tissue. In a single cubic millimetre of brain tissue, there are some one hundred million ...”

“... he was satisfied’, all the details coalesce into a portrait of Eugenides’s late contemporary David Foster Wallace. I want to call Leonard a ‘tribute’ to Wallace, whose suicide presumably occurred while Eugenides was in the middle of writing the book. But most of the time Leonard is an unpleasant character. Mitchell Grammaticus particularly dislikes ...”

“... resentment. Greek anti-semitism erupted in pogroms in Smyrna and Salonica. (Ottoman Jews, whom David Ben-Gurion despaired of converting to Zionism, were thus natural allies of the Turks.) In Alexandria under the Ottomans and from 1882 under the British, Europeans considered it acceptable to give Arabs a good hiding from time to time. The blending of ...”

“... debate between historical experts. Now they listen to the platitudes of Simon Schama or watch David Starkey astride the gun barrel of a tank pontificating about Henry VIII. Blair Worden, leading revisionist and elder statesman of 17th-century political history, is on record as worrying that ‘public life has never been less historically conscious or ...”

“... the capacious context of such postwar avant-garde novelists as Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago and David Foster Wallace, only to acknowledge that, despite a shared affinity for ‘very long, breathing, unstopped sentences’, Krasznahorkai was ‘perhaps the strangest’ of them. The writer is ‘peculiar’; his work is ‘strange and beautiful’, with ...”

“... is much better, muscular and panoramic, but it lacks the surprise details and sense of outrage of David Peace’s treatment in his great miner’s strike novel, GB84.* Welsh makes his political points more effectively through his storytelling. Renton and Sick Boy move to London and live in a filthy towerblock in pre-gentrification Hackney – ‘the London ...”

“... and as long as our environmental consciousness is tied to the idea of breathtaking scenery or David Attenborough’s ramblings about charismatic fauna, we will be satisfied with the preservation of beautiful symbols. Activists chain themselves to trees while Coca-Cola appeases guilty consciences by printing some arrows in a Möbius loop on the label of a ...”

“... powerful man in the country and do their best to pretend he has some claim to be taken seriously (David Cameron reached the same plateau when his inability to remember how many houses he owned was allowed to fade into oblivion). With the result in the bag, the party handlers could safely let Kenny out of his pen for the final three-way debate. All in ...”

“... racism of the type that depicted Africans as cartoon cannibals. Rehabilitation was slow. In 1986 David Eden argued in a psychoanalytical study that the cruelty was sadomasochism of an infantile, and therefore less than sinister, kind. Gilbert, like his characters, inhabited a pre-genital universe somewhere between fairyland and nightmare. Accusations of ...”