“... Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, David Skal and Elias Savada recount the casting process for Freaks: In a Montreal sideshow, scouts discovered Johnny Eckhardt … a startling ‘half-boy’ whose body ended below the ribcage. The armless, legless Prince Randian was a native of British Guiana who ...”

“... Emily Brontë poems. Fred was even worse: in 1913 he wrote three novels in eight months – David Blaize, The Freaks of Mayfair and Mike. In the last three years of his life he managed eight books. Of his ‘masterpiece’ As We Were (1932), his modern biographer observes deadpan: ‘Significantly, the manuscript demonstrates that Fred took greater care ...”

“... of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in 2015, including Thomas Piketty and David Blanchflower (who tweeted ‘he has no economic policies’). Corbyn’s former policy chief, Neale Coleman, who was often described as the most effective member of his team, has now been announced as a top adviser to his opponent in the leadership ...”

“... been dismissed. In 1937 the Nazis staged the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. (Salomon, David Foenkinos imagines in his novel, ‘positions herself on the side of the despised artists’.) In 1938, she submitted a piece for an anonymous fine arts competition; having picked it as the winner, the jury panicked when they discovered it was by a Jewish ...”

“... For David Edmonds​ , and for many other philosophers, Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, was one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century, perhaps even since John Stuart Mill. Edmonds rightly believes that if Parfit’s ideas about personal identity, rationality and equality were absorbed into our moral and political thinking, they would radically alter our beliefs about punishment, the distribution of social resources, our relationship to future generations, and more ...”

“... he turned the internship into a job and before long was working as a trader in the department of FX swaps. These are financial instruments in which two parties agree to temporarily swap a loan in one currency for a loan in another, and the difference in respective interest rates is paid accordingly. I exchange my euros, which pay 2 per cent interest, for ...”

“... essays – during the period of composition the world does nothing but give you gifts.They love David Foster Wallace here, and I have read no one but him for months. His books are everywhere in tall voluble stacks – a writer is always everywhere when you are working on them. I feel partially disrobed when I see his name. At my sickest, I had begun asking ...”

“... he a gross libel on the dead, but which is a gem of public-school literature, and his essay on David Alton (‘Lord Alton of Knitting Needle’) is one of the most ferocious pieces I have ever read. Centre journalists doubtless did not like it, but it is enough in itself to make the book worth possessing. There is also a peculiarly successful ...”

“... his poetry with the way the names of places and characters are put to work in the writings of David Jones in order to see how purely poetic, how non-programmatic, how free from the whiff of the scholar’s midnight oil, are the topographic and mythological elements in MacLean’s work. Jones often intended to instruct his audience in what they should know ...”

“... affairs secretary, and Bernard Ingham, her press officer, and a handful of personal familiars like David Wolfson and Tim Bell, it is hard to think of a single Cabinet politician, perhaps excepting the ever-supplicant Joseph, who did not eventually find themselves, after a period in the sun, banished into the half-light: the most recent victim of this expulsion ...”

“... section of Tenured Radicals to the de Man affair, as an academic cover-up of Watergate dimensions. David Lehman’s Signs of the Times – reviewed here not long ago by Claude Rawson – is a narrative and meditation on the same subject. The tone is less enjoyably sarcastic than Kimball’s, but Lehman too is convinced that the de Man case is symptomatic of a ...”

“... that dispose one somewhat more against Tennant. Philip Hoare relates one, as told by the Hon. David Herbert, about his treatment of the actress Margaret Rutherford. He cultivated her assiduously – even, more or less, proposing marriage to her – and she fell for his charms, and then when one day she came to his house for the weekend, he quite shattered ...”

“... been physically impervious to the forty-five years of the Cold War. This curious fact is noted in David Monaghan’s monograph The Novels of John le Carré (1985). Smiley married his wife Ann towards the end of the World War Two. He was evidently then well into his thirties. In 1960, in A Murder of Quality, he was described as ‘the very prototype of an ...”

“... military presence in Nato; John Young’s reassessment of British attitudes to European union; David Reynolds on the sharply different views of the post-1945 strategic pattern held by Attlee and Bevin, and the clash of the British chiefs of staff (already looking on Russia as the new enemy) first with the Foreign Office (which initially wanted to appease ...”

“... he wrote, ‘needed private carriers to help them struggle along under great loads.’ David Bergamini, Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy We almost collided with some SS officers who were carting up silver and other loot from the basement. One had a gold-framed picture under his arm. One was the commandant. His arms were loaded with silver knives and ...”