“... then: one in Montreal in 1945, one in Toronto in 1958 etc. In particular, he tells the story of David Carr, a Manchester sailor who died in 1959, and was widely reported some years ago as having been the ‘first’ Aids victim. Over the course of some fifty pages, threaded in and out of the book, Hooper elucidates Carr’s tours of duty with 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have suspected it, but in Lloyd George’s lifetime it was never publicly exposed. Margaret and David Lloyd George continued to share houses, holidays, family cares and political duties; and Stevenson’s competence at her job (not to mention the fact that she looked, as John Campbell notes, ‘too prim to be anything so improper as a mistress’) warded ...”

“... of biblical truth. For the modern reader, such relentless classicism can cause odd problems. As David Daiches once remarked, we are often in the uncomfortable position of forming our knowledge of classical mythology by inferring from Miltonic allusion. Most modern students probably first encounter Ovid’s Narcissus through Milton’s Eve, gazing on her own ...”

“... are a proper visible expression of forces at work on the structure. The final result, according to David Newland, technical adviser to the bridge’s funding body, is ‘probably the most complex passively-damped structure in the world’. (In an actively-damped system an input of energy is required to answer the force with a counterforce; in a passive ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... says admiringly. Hundreds if not thousands of books came back across the Channel, of which (says David Dumville) maybe eleven can be identified. One of the books imported was an enormous Old Latin Bible from Cassiodorus’s Vivarium. It has not survived, but served as a format-model for the great Codex Amiatinus written at the twin foundations of ...”

“... 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 ...”