“... Dr Davis’s book is a long, careful and detailed study of utopian writing in England from Sir Thomas More to the end of the 17th century. He has interesting things to say about well-known figures like More, Bacon, Winstanley and Harrington, but I found his chapters on lesser writers even more instructive. Robert Burton and Samuel Gott are revealed as more significant ‘utopians’ than has been recognised ...”

“... delivered without notes. What made it appear a triumph was the speech given the next day by David Davis, Cameron’s main rival for the Tory Party leadership and the man long considered the favourite to succeed Michael Howard. Davis flopped. He spoke woodenly from behind a lectern without any of Cameron’s natural ...”

“... that by all means in this country,’ Alderman Roberts of Grantham was moved to remark in 1946. As John Davis concluded in the Cambridge Urban History of Britain (2000), the second half of the 20th century saw local authorities reduced to ‘agents of the central welfare state, their incapacity off-set by central subsidies which covered over 60 per cent ...”

“... When David Davis, the shadow home secretary, announced his resignation as an MP on 12 June – in order to fight a by-election for his own seat on an issue about which he was in total agreement with his party’s line, on which in fact he was his party’s line – the media nearly choked with delight. The BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, called the resignation ‘without precedent’, and rubbed his hands at the thought of the Tory divisions that must surely lie beneath; only to be told by eager citizen bloggers that there were clear precedents – George Lansbury in 1912, Enoch Powell in 1958 – and that Davis was an incarnation of that forgotten thing: the politician with principles, a man standing up for his beliefs ...”

“... Ilearned​ only recently, from Charlotte Chandler’s biography, that Bette Davis had taken her first name from a Balzac novel, not knowing, apparently, that the character in question was ‘rather a bitch’. All too appropriate, we might think, since Davis referred to the people she played in movies as ‘all those bitches I had to take everywhere with me ...”

“... those who appeared there from time to time with a guest evidently not his wife was Rupert Hart-Davis. He was unique among those couples, with their faintly clandestine air, in boldly underlining his presence within the pub by parking outside the entrance a publisher’s van on the side of which was inscribed in large letters: RUPERT HART-...”

“... were filled in America. The largest psychiatric institutions downsized or were shuttered. John F. Kennedy announced that the ‘reliance on the cold mercy of custodial isolation’ could now be ‘supplanted by the open warmth of community concern and capability’. It didn’t work out like that.Mimi thought that as long as her boys took their ...”

“... Falklands, where lightning can ignite the tussock-grass in spring. You can make a case for John Davis or Sir Richard Hawkins, just as if you are not English you can make a case for some earlier Iberian voyage. The articles ‘Falkland’s Islands’ in the last two editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica give the honour to the English as if there ...”

“... by a Thai Communist hit squad in Bangkok later that year. How much​ did the British know? John Davis, the Force 136 man who was closest to Chin Peng, Lai Tek’s successor as MCP leader, had been in the prewar Special Branch. He knew the secret of Mr Wright, but did not tell his comrade. Anyway, the end of the war brought a new situation. In ...”

“... English acquaintance have written brief, anecdotal accounts based on their memories of him – John St John’s To the War with Waugh has 56 pages, Frances Donaldson’s Portrait of a Country Neighbour 118, while those collected in Evelyn Waugh and his World are naturally shorter still. It is true that Alec Waugh ...”

“... pursuit of a ‘militant geography’ larger and grander than the mere search for knowledge. Wade Davis’s book on the British Everest expeditions of 1921, 1922 and 1924 shows how each demonstrated its own form of militant geography, its own blend of poetry and politics, error and achievement. Mallory occupies the centre of this story, but the book reaches ...”

“... style’ to a dogged defence of democratic socialism. None of this sounds at all like Lydia Davis. It’s no surprise, then, that the invitation to deliver the Windham-Campbell Lecture on the topic of ‘Why I Write’ at Yale in the autumn of 2024 should have resulted in a short book with a frankly diversionary title. Or that the book itself should ...”

“... in French tells the story of three college girls – Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis – who did. Kaplan, who wrote about her own year abroad in the memoir French Lessons, takes the three, who didn’t meet, as examples of mid-20th-century types: the (Catholic) aesthete, the (Jewish) bohemian and the (black) political activist.* In Paris it ...”

“... out hypocrisy. How exactly are you any better, is the question behind most of his questions. Evan Davis on Newsnight is even more courteous and if anything even more condescending. At the other end of the scale is Nick Ferrari on LBC, host of the phone-ins Call Clegg and Ask Boris, who alternates between chummy complicity and violent outrage, often abruptly ...”

“... hard and keen like a hunting animal.’ Here Leo’s daimon is adapting and echoing the words of John Pory, who in 1600 published an English translation of the historical Leo’s La Descrittione dell’ Africa: ‘How many desolate cold mountains and huge drie, and barren deserts passed he? How often was he in hazard to have been captived, or to have had his ...”