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“... chiefly remembered as a model for the helplessly inept Dora Spenlow in the quasi-autobiographical David Copperfield, she was much tougher than the ditzy Dora. She was interested in Dickens, but not overwhelmed. He courted her passionately for three years, with the same determination he was applying, much more effectively, to his job. When she finally turned ...”

“... it until his death. After he had swallowed something once, he never stopped taking the medicine. David Caute begins The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (1973) with the story of Hewlett and Nowell escaping from the World Peace Council and clambering aboard a local bus going they knew not where and Hewlett saying to the driver: ‘Tickets ...”

“... the consolations of an essential self. There never was such a thing, for Barthes any more than for David Hume, and we are doubtless all the better for it. What looks like a loss is actually a liberation. Unity is an illusion, and consistency is more a vice than a virtue. Postmodernism is full of personality cults, but they know themselves to be ...”

“... art can make and the support it can give to bad government are evident in Bell’s treatment of David (‘this cheerleader-cum-weathervane’) and the Death of Marat. He tracks its ‘terse, glare-lit, blocked-off pictorial space’ back to Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi, and the genre, the martyr-portrait, to religious art: ‘...”

“... because – as is becoming customary (see the books on Britain’s later colonial wars by Saul David) – neither author romanticises his subject to any great degree. Both are good on the daily lives of 18th and early 19th-century soldiers, and on the boring periods between battles. They mention (and Latimer has quite a bit about) the many women ...”

“... Wilhelm Müller or that Arcadia is a play by Tom Stoppard. Patric Dickinson, Felicity Ashbee and David Cecil are among the dozens of names who pass by unnoted and still more are missing from the index. How Fitzgerald came to know Stevie Smith and when it was that T.S. Eliot told her that the staircase from the Poetry Bookshop featured in ‘Ash ...”

“... and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (whose eponymous antihero worked in PR). Emerging stars like David Ogilvy and Norman B. Norman publicised the ad man’s mystique of deep creative force, genius and restraint, as an up-to-date alternative to the old market barker’s persistence. Industry opened its purses to pay for strange approaches (Louis Cheskin’s ...”

“... Valentino got to ‘strut half naked in another prolonged dressing scene’. Leider disagrees with David Bret’s claim, in Valentino: A Dream of Desire, that Valentino was ‘a closeted gay man whose close friendships with men involved sex . . . and that Natacha was exclusively a lesbian who enjoyed setting up her husband with other men.’ Yet she ...”

“... French version, the yarmulka is out and the cross (along with the hand of Fatima and the Star of David) has to be very discreet, while some tricky technical problems remain over how to rule on Sikh students. Opponents, including the main French human rights organisation, La Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, have argued rightly that the veil is the real target ...”

“... equipped 101st Airborne Division had been stationed in Mosul. The division’s commander, General David Petraeus, probably the most intelligent senior American officer in Iraq, reached a tentative understanding with the local Sunni Arab establishment. Thousands of former army officers took a public oath renouncing the Baath Party. The Kurds were furious that ...”

“... with imperialism. Cromer’s rule in Egypt exemplified this. It was full of display – what David Cannadine calls ‘ornamentalism’ – designed to impress both aristocrats and peasants. He also had to compete with Egypt’s formal (or puppet) ruler, the khedive, in this field. Owen suggests that another purpose of all this showing off was to hide the ...”

“... herself marooned on a desert island with a slave whom she despises but is wholly reliant on’. David Dabydeen, whose 1987 book, Hogarth’s Blacks, was a study of ‘Images of Blacks in 18th-Century English Art’, based his novel A Harlot’s Progress (1999) on a startled black servant in one of Hogarth’s illustrations for The Harlot’s Progress. He ...”

“... to be added to spore suspensions to stop them clumping when they are prepared and dried, but as David Henderson from Porton Down said in 1952, in a journal to be found in any medical school library, ‘fortunately many substances added to the suspension will prevent clumping. The simplest and most effective that has been found is sodium alginate used in ...”

“... de l’Etoile’ is both the location of the Arc de Triomphe and the site of the Star of David worn by Jews during the Occupation. The narrator doesn’t know why she was picked up, only that she finally left Drancy for Auschwitz with her father, who had also been arrested, in September 1942. Her mother, arrested and released in July because no ...”

“... eldest son, Bill, was dull; and of the other three boys, all of whom were highly intelligent, only David fulfilled his potential. Against his mother’s violent and continuing opposition her husband made him editor of the Astor-owned Observer, where he proved himself to be probably the best of all British post-Second World War editors. The other two, as well ...”