“... had a reputation for enjoying popular culture. He once made a TV programme celebrating the work of David Byrne of Talking Heads. In 2008, it was reported in the nationals that he’d set an exam question asking for Amy Winehouse’s ‘Love Is a Losing Game’ to be compared with a ballad by Walter Raleigh. Here, in a lecture on comic timing, Griffiths reads a ...”

“... and ‘every single postwar prime minister, from Clement Attlee (whom I met at the theatre) to David Cameron’, as well as other ‘formidable and extraordinarily interesting people, despite being rather dull myself’. She was born, as Jean Campbell-Harris, in 1922 to aristocratic parents who sent her to a series of schools where she was ‘dreadfully ...”

“... an odd thing to say given that the Spanish Inquisition had practically patented the ‘auto-da-fé’ or act of faith which, under Mary and Philip, would turn English Protestants into martyrs. Although Philip was all for ‘greater firmness in religion’, as he euphemistically put it in a letter to his father, he viewed the first wave of burnings with ...”

“... 1970s from the confluence of the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Camp David Accords and the 1979 siege of Makkah. Like al-Qaida before it, IS sought the eventual destruction of the Saudi monarchy. But IS and the Sauds have things in common. Both were determined to act against apostasy and heresy; both insisted on the dangers of ...”

“... all conceivably be a figment of Seth’s increasingly deranged imagination. There is a series of David Lynch-style time-slip and personality-slip effects. One moment he is in jail in present-day Mississippi; the next he’s a black man in the 1920s, charged with a crime he didn’t commit. The second half of the book is skilfully constructed, page by ...”

“... an unfinished bust of Brutus, an unfinished statue of a standing figure possibly representing David and possibly Apollo, and the so-called Manhattan Boy, a very damaged and puzzling figure first identified in New York about half a century ago, and then forgotten until the 1990s. The attribution has often been questioned, but there is good evidence that it ...”

“... myopia’ for drawing lines between empirical psychology and philosophy. He urges a return to David Hume and William Whewell, for whom the two fields were one. ‘For much of the history of philosophy,’ Machery writes, ‘philosophers could not have imagined their philosophising as separate from not only mathematics, but also the empirical ...”

“... crisis of obesity, the topic has, as it were, ballooned. Forth’s book joins, among others, David and Fiona Haslam’s Fat, Gluttony and Sloth: Obesity in Literature, Art and Medicine (2009), Sander Gilman’s Obesity: The Biography (2010) and Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2000 Years by Louise Foxcroft (2011). All of these are ...”

“... he was a child (we are told), but had scant interest in what he might do with it should he get it. David Cameron explained that he wanted to be prime minister ‘because I think I’d be good at it’, but this is something Johnson has never maintained about himself. The evidence to the contrary is already accumulating rapidly. And yet, there he ...”

“... Barry Hannah, Diane Williams and Mary Robison.One of the best accounts of Lish’s influence is in David Leavitt’s roman à clef Martin Bauman; Or, a Sure Thing. He appears in the first paragraph of the first chapter disguised as Stanley Flint, a creative writing teacher and human resources nightmare:Wild rumours circulated about this seminar. It was said ...”

“... unbreakable spirit to win! Fighting the Hun with pepper? Was that something that Jimmy Perry and David Croft, the fecund scriptwriters of Dad’s Army, dreamed up in a dizzy moment? Not so. Charles Graves, an early historian of the Home Guard, refers to a unit which suggested in orders that any rudimentary weapons ‘could be usefully supplemented by a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”