“... of the best ones, are bent on sin. Simply that (for the present venture in criticism) handling sin may be the right way to take hold of the bundle.’ The seven deadly sins and their antitheses, the four cardinal virtues and three heavenly graces, provide the book’s organising principle. A pair of introductions, ‘Sins, Virtues, Heavenly Graces’ and ...”

“... Fittko, who has no part in Birman’s story, made a preliminary excursion from Banyuls on what may well, it appears from her own memoir, Escape through the Pyrenees (1985), have been the same day. Fittko was a stateless anti-Fascist, an agitator and propagandist, born in Austria-Hungary; she had lived in Vienna, Berlin and Prague and was, by the end of the ...”

“... helped foster a revolution in sexual mores, politics and drug consumption? Schütte thinks they may be even more important than that. ‘Could, for example, techno have emerged from inner-city areas of Detroit without them?’ The link can’t be denied, but it’s something else to claim techno wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Kraftwerk. Techno ...”

“... a real interruption, but one which had only recently begun. Most interesting of all, the empire of David and Solomon, whose absolute dates are for special reasons retained, now coincides with the glories of the Canaanite Late Bronze Age, instead of languishing in the apparent squalor of the Early Iron Age It all sounds rather attractive, What will be its ...”

“... habit of making at different stages of their careers. The last factor is more important than it may at first appear. Dickens, it is often observed, apparently embarked on working notes only with his fourth novel, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), and systematised the practice with Dombey and Son (1846-47), his seventh novel. Like other commentators, Stone ...”

“... an idea of synchronicity to which the authors of this volume make only glancing reference. Here we may recall, not only the existence of a long-established world-chronometry such that people in Caracas and Madrid knew they were simultaneously acting out their roles in, say, ‘1627 AD’, but that, in its very essence, time was now ‘man-made’ and ...”

“... a quintessential experience with their fellow Americans. As it turned out, not even the terrible David Letterman managed to squeeze off a burst about Mr Simpson or anything related to the trial. The evening was, as some magazines have taken to claiming on their covers, ‘100 per cent O.J.-free’. In truth, the industry does not quite know what to make of ...”

“... Irish. Hartnett confesses himself to be ‘obsessed by the work and mind of Daibhi O Bruadair’ (David Broderick or Brouder), the 17th-century poet from the Limerick area who witnessed the tragic sequence of events which destroyed his native cultural habitat: ‘the Popish Plot, the coming of Cromwell, the battle of the Boyne, the Treaty of Limerick and its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or fame exceeded their proven abilities. Wittgenstein, the mathematician Max Newman, the economist David Champernowne, von Neumann, Robin Gandy the logician, were men with whom he could be at ease, free of the social patina and the trappings of respectibility which repelled him. There are records of Turing’s participation in pre-war Cambridge, in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... found the cowed, emaciated, dirty Hassids of the Pale strange and often repulsive. The synagogues may have moved him, but so did sightings of things he associated with Western culture: a classical façade on a Polish manor house; a German bookshop in Brody, where there was even a Hotel Bristol (but can it have been any less seedy than Joseph Roth’s Galician ...”

“... more manacled by the observances of etiquette.’ On less grand occasions they met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine visited Tom Paine, ‘up half a dozen flights of stairs, in a remote part ...”

“... government had been voted out of office in 1984, and the incoming Labour administration of David Lange did at least begin to take the Crown’s obligations under the Te Tiriti (the 1840 treaty between the British and the Māori) seriously. The Waitangi Tribunal, through its major 1986 report on the preservation of Te Reo (the Māori language), had also ...”

“... coral towards the surface is a way of tracking the even slower subsidence of the ocean floor. As David Dobbs observed in Reef Madness (2005), Darwin’s account of atoll formation has similarities with his later theory of natural selection. Tiny creatures can build islands; minute variations can create species. Both theories offer a natural-historical ...”