“... jazz, either at live gigs, ‘or sitting at home with the headphones on, listening to the likes of David Sanborn or the Yellowjackets’. In this story she disables a knife-wielding mugger with a quick knee to the groin, shoots two rooftop guards through the head and then slays a few more villains in a sewer. Unlike the ever-sweating male characters (who are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a drive by two hundred underwriting members to force a vote of no confidence in the chairman, David Coleridge, and the ruling council. It is clear, then, that Jonathan Mantle has a riveting tale to tell in For whom the bell tolls, and it is a matter of some regret that he tells it so maladroitly. The book is jerky and anecdotal and unstructured. He has ...”

“... the 17th century that would challenge what she and her friends saw as the Tory version supplied by David Hume. The first volume was an immediate bestseller when it appeared in 1763, and so to a lesser extent were its four successors which were all published before 1773. Insisting on and obtaining what was then the quite extraordinary sum of £1000 per ...”

“... for thirty pages reluctant to let his book go, even to hand it over to his fictional alter ego, David Kobra. He has a sub-Kunderesque divagation on his ‘philosophy of ecstasy’ before going on to the ownership of property – descriptions of remote and magnificent real estate are my hot tip for fiction-writers in this last decade of the ...”

“... Moore about sketching people in London air-raid shelters. Facts, though, aren’t everything, as David Cecil argued early in 1941, in an article lamenting the propagandist pressures being brought to bear on artists. Prisoners of war were commended for escaping, he pointed out. Why shouldn’t writers be escapists, too? This was itself a shocking thing to ...”

“... trouble in accepting the working classes as partners in running the country, from his co-option of David Kirkwood to help organise Labour in the First World War to his virtual delegation of labour relations to Ernest Bevin in the Second. His birth, background and personality made him far less sensitive to social nuances than most of his political ...”

“... archness when he speaks of ‘the great intellectual Western racialists such as Francis Bacon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson and G.W.F. Hegel’, finds racialist ‘truths’ less easy to come by. After all, as he points out, when blacks begin to produce ‘literature’, they make a revolution by that very activity. The eruption into ...”

“... the one person Genghiz had feared and respected.) Kitbuga may have been inspired to try playing David at Goliath’s Spring: at any rate he attacked the Sultan (who inspired his own soldiers with the cry of ‘O Islam’) without the usual Mongol craft and precaution, and lost his army and his life. Had Hulagu been able to return he would certainly have ...”

“... cover of each diary were the plastic initials AH, except where he ran out of A’s and had to put F’s instead. He did this on the volume illustrated on its front cover by Stern on the day when the magazine finally launched on the world the greatest scoop of all time, Fred Hitler’s diary. The diaries were mostly copied, not always accurately, from dry ...”

“... meanness and despair and everything that tries to drag us under. An ailing husband or modern King David goes off for a last restorative fling with an accommodating Bathsheba. ‘Don’t come back grouchy,’ says the wife. Other writers’ women would have broken pots. On learning of the death of her son, a mother sleeps well for the first time in two ...”

“... 17th century the same international concerns produced the Evangelical Union, the eirenicism of David Pareus, and the disastrous attempt, which provoked the Thirty Years War, to annex Bohemia for the reformed cause. In the next generation they produced the globe-trotting ecumenical initiatives of Dury and Comenius. Those themes, rich and richly ...”

“... are besieged by customers overweight in their baggage, who are taking back washing-machines, hi-fi, fridges and televisions. Ugandan shops are quite well stocked with imported goods, so that Kenyans, who find it harder to get them, cross the border to buy. Behind high fences, dogs, and armed askaris (you hear gunfire every night in the centre of ...”

“... Elton leafing through A la Carte as a substitute for actual cooking, and Emma consulting Elizabeth David for instruction in the matter of marrow-bones. Wherever the daily human comedy of manners is deployed as a cloak for our brute, indispensable appetites and satisfactions, food and drink must be present or, if absent, must expect to have their absence ...”

“... before he had been provoked either by libel or ‘sustained vilification’. It started at David Frost’s house in July 1975 when Frost (who told the story to Peter Jay) introduced Goldsmith to Wilson and Falkender. Since both Goldsmith and Wilson had, at different times, declared that the Eye was dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and social ...”