“... which independent and formidable aunts play leading roles spring immediately to mind: Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, Bleak House, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss. Clearly this figure is not ‘an 18th-century phenomenon’, but what does that prove? It shows only that Victorian plots drew on the same resources as 18th-century ...”

“... in exile had attracted the attention of many non-professionals, most strikingly in the novels of David Malouf (An Imaginary Life, 1978) and Christoph Ransmayr (The Last World, 1988). Interest in exile as a subject has reinforced the relentless expansion of modern scholarship into former niche areas, and Ovid’s exile poetry has now become one of Latin’s ...”

“... use of tax havens by virtually every major global bank and multinational business has nullified David Ricardo’s doctrine of comparative advantage. Fundamentalist advocates of a no-holds-barred approach to free trade have persistently turned a blind eye to this problem. For those like Baker – and myself – who believe that free and fair trade can ...”

“... chose to file a libel suit against Grunewald. What followed turned into the political trial of David Ben-Gurion and his party, to which Kastner belonged. Grunewald was acquitted. Kastner, the German-born judge wrote, ‘had sold his soul to the devil’. In Zertal’s view this was the beginning of Ben-Gurion’s downfall. Worn out by the scandal, he ...”

“... Chasing a cross-dressing serial killer through a tunnel beneath Helsinki, Timo Harjunpää, the hero of The Priest of Evil by Matti-Yrjänä Joensuu, pulls out his gun and then pauses to consider the health and safety implications of what he’s doing. ‘He recalled that this communal tunnel was used for almost everything: water and drainage, heating, electricity, telephone cables ...”

“... the minister most responsible for Parliamentary reform, has been an almost complete failure. The David Blunkett of Sheffield Council days is scarcely recognisable as the present Education Secretary; while Jack Straw’s attitudes are all too familiar. And they are the big-hitters. Furthermore, the constitutional and political powerlessness of the ...”

“... perhaps doubted whether the more serious charge would hold up. The trials of Robert Watt and David Downie, which revealed parallel plots for insurrection in London, Edinburgh and Dublin, set a more direct precedent. They were the first trials for high treason to take place in Scotland since the 1351 statute had become law there. The Government took its ...”

“... legitimate the witch-hunts of all recent governments against ‘lazy’ academics. I rather hope David Blunkett never reads The Dons. But were dons, as a group, ever, even a hundred years ago, as Annan paints them? I doubt it. Annan wittily recounts a whole series of myths of the eccentric ‘college man’ of the early to mid-20th century. These stories, to ...”

“... baronage. Smith should not be aligned too closely with critics of the Ancien Régime. Like David Hume, he admired the way modern European monarchies, such as France, protected personal freedoms. When outlining the complex patchwork of taxes which ‘oppressed’ the subjects of the French monarchy, he felt compelled to point out that France was ...”

“... an ageing widower. His wife Nadia, once the beautiful young girl, has died of cancer. Their son, David-Rico, has taken off to India-Nepal-Thailand, as all young Israelis do, if you believe the fuss, as Oz seems to, about ‘migration’ in the Israeli media. The son’s girlfriend, Dita, lives in Tel Aviv, in a district frequented (if you believe the fuss in ...”

“... book can readily be compared to works like Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (David Shipman), Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (Steven Bach), or biographies of the Kennedys. It is characteristic of many such books that they begin far back, with early antecedents, and in the case of Seabiscuit there are many to account for, from Charles ...”

“... from Dreyfus, we can see what Proust meant. Yet the Iraq crisis had been unfolding before Dr David Kelly’s death – whatever Lord Justice Hutton’s inquiry concludes – and the sense that Iraq did not cause but nevertheless represents a crisis of the Labour Party has been with us for months now. The extent of the continued underfunding of the public ...”

“... by Philip Wylie in Generation of Vipers, the conformist ‘other directed’ man described by David Riesman, the ever distancing nature of reality in the age of Daniel Boorstin’s ‘pseudo-event’, and the seemingly hypnotic new mass medium of television. The Manchurian Candidate was the first film to film television, in a scene in which Lansbury ...”

“... in her diaries. 1 July 1939: ‘Jojo, thin, only 120 lbs, but very good. I read a chapter of David Copperfield a day to him, explaining points of conduct, geography, history, character, ethics, etc, and it seems a means of awakening him to realities.’ 7 February 1940: Jojo is ‘better than I ever knew him – in the thrill to his mind his walk changed ...”

“... and Kulturkritik. Kuper’s three chapter-length profiles of American anthropologists (Geertz, David Schneider and Marshall Sahlins) are followed by a composite chapter on the younger (now middle-aged) generation of James Clifford and George Marcus, co-editors of Writing Culture. Here the tone changes. Up to this point Kuper has been gently ...”