“... except their labour. In their 1979 case study of Terling, a village in Essex, Keith Wrightson and David Levine described a massive upward redistribution of wealth between 1525 and 1700, and descriptions of early modern society since theirs have been full of people like Edward Ballard, a ‘pore needy felloe’ with ‘noe certen place of aboad’ living apart ...”

“... adhere to the mandates of identity politics or the constrictions of literary genre. Writing with David Foster Wallace-level verbal firepower, he was prepared to subvert the simplistic clichés attached to blackness – and the impulse towards sentimentality that goes along with them. At the height of black rapture over Obama’s election, Whitehead published ...”

“... Ivy League or the great state universities. So Middleton wasn’t wanting for company. The poet David Wevill was a long-time friend and neighbour. The brilliant Swedish poet and fiction writer Lars Gustafsson turned up in 1974, and kept Christopher both amused and busy translating his poetry into English. John Silber, who later became a reactionary ...”

“... with Brussels and the EU 27, reporting back directly not to his own secretary of state, David Davis, but to the prime minister? The magnitude of Brexit is daunting enough, but, within the realm of what was manageable, did the May government marshal its counsellors as effectively as it could have done? Cameron’s European advisers had deliberately ...”

“... the Boches as a pleasing omen of more to come of the same sort’.By the turn of the century, as David Olusoga explained in The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire (2014), Britain had already sorted its Indian subjects into martial races (mostly hardy mountain types from the Punjab and Nepal) and effeminate races (typically people of the plateau and ...”

“... of Di Benedetto’s style; not so easy to live with what that style chooses to show us. David Pérez Vega, in a blog of 2011, finds in The Silencer a phrase that ‘appears to be a synthesis of Di Benedetto’s reflections on existence’: ‘How can they ignore the essential fact, that error is incorporated into the very roots of humankind?’ For ...”

“... is to blame?’ The crime itself is oddly anachronistic. It’s more than twenty years since David Foster Wallace placed a lethally entertaining video cartridge at the centre of Infinite Jest. Who records a videotape these days? Who sends out dozens of copies of that tape by mail? When the first tape surfaces, at a local news station in Chicago, the ...”

“... that their masters don’t habitually roll out the tanks. We need also to take account of David Hume, who writes rather surprisingly that ‘force is always on the side of the governed,’ meaning that governments stay in power on the back of public opinion. For Bull, by contrast, the survival of the state is not a question of opinion, or even perhaps ...”

“... His stories were filled with perverted theme parks, creepy testing facilities and grungy sci-fi conceits, all rendered in a hypercolloquial idiolect that set the chipper barbarities of capitalism in scathing relief. When CivilWarLand appeared, in the mid-1990s, it was quickly swept up into one of America’s rare and mysterious revolutions in ...”

“... More remarkable, if not so successful in totality, are Bell’s paintings of Lytton Strachey and David Garnett, from 1913 and 1915. The former’s glasses and beard are painted bright yellow in a strange experiment; the latter, a topless portrait, has a mother-of-pearl luminescence to its skin tones, the small dark dots of Garnett’s eyes and set mouth ...”

“... boring Arsenal. Even when they won, they were losers.In 1989, while coaching Monaco, Wenger met David Dein, the Arsenal vice chairman. Wenger went to an Arsenal match and after the game shared a cigarette with a friend of Barbara Dein, David’s wife. He was invited to their house in Totteridge, North London, for supper ...”

“... rhinestone of a Juicy Couture sweatsuit. Reading this novel, I thought (warily? unfortunately?) of David Foster Wallace, also white, also Midwestern, though the child of college professors. The portal has censured Wallace for his mawkish depictions of trans people, for stalking Mary Karr and for being the patron saint of pedantic male suitors since 1996. But ...”

“... where such things are more likely to occur. (Two modern editions of the Requiem – those of David Wulstan and Bruno Turner – try to correct the offending octaves in the Benedictus but in doing so introduce two sets of consecutive fifths. It would have been better to leave Victoria with his momentary slip, as Rees does in his new online edition of the ...”

“... push the court into the public eye than abortion. In Britain abortion was legalised as a result of David Steel’s Abortion Bill of 1967, but in the US abortion rights have never had democratic legitimacy of this kind, resting instead on the 7-2 decision reached by nine male judges in Roe v. Wade (1973). The justices managed to establish abortion rights in the ...”