“... times. For the first time being a Jew mattered: if Costantino Tritto would not remove the Star of David he liked to wear in his lapel, there might be serious reprisals against the town. The curious German officers who looked into Manduzio’s room with its Hebrew inscriptions and insignia caused a panic, but fortunately went away and didn’t return. But the ...”

“... and messiness cleaned up. Compare, for example, Dyer’s anti-travel writing with that of the late David Foster Wallace, another sort-of post-mod sort-of slacker, with many similar interests and of much the same generation. Dyer could not, as Wallace did in ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ (1996), study the horror of embodiment while ...”

“... Before it was a classic film, Gone with the Wind was a classic PR stunt. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible ...”

“... of the 19th, and in the ‘creative illnesses’ of young intellectuals such as David Hume, John Stuart Mill – or Sigmund Freud. In fact, all these men suffered from hysteria: that is, if we subscribe to Micale’s line of reasoning, from an unacceptable femininity that the body of masculine medicine could only ‘repress’ and ...”

“... but there were plenty of ways around them. In 1817, the Scottish evangelical naturalist and editor David Brewster filed a patent for an optical instrument he called the ‘kaleidoscope’. But the craftsman he had hired immediately took the instrument to a variety of London ‘tinmen’ and ‘glaziers’, who began producing their own versions, and ...”

“... million off GCHQ’s annual budget. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, the Labour prime minister David Lange, from whose country the US was threatening to withdraw intelligence co-operation in reprisal for his government’s ban on ships carrying nuclear weapons, responded that the sigint America sent him was pretty useless, and that cutting it off was ...”

“... and there is even a computer game in which you can play at bashing the British at Canton. Wasn’t David Cameron aware of all this when he arrived in Beijing in November 2010 wearing a Remembrance Day poppy in his buttonhole? Or the right-wing press, when it heaped praise on him for allegedly refusing to remove it when the Chinese asked him? That will have ...”

“... against the interlopers by inventing evangelistic exploits for ancient saints like Dyfrig or David. Malcolm Lambert is a judicious guide to the shifting opinions of scholars amid these quicksands, casting a sceptical eye even on Bede’s motives for glorifying and sanitising the Roman mission to the Anglo-Saxons. What makes Lambert’s account so ...”

“... in the air and to avoid the echoes the English term might haphazardly call up: the name of a sci-fi magazine, various shopping centres up and down the country, a game show, and an early Britney Spears album. Tarkovsky’s Zone is another place. But the words I have quoted are not the end of the book. We turn the page and read a quotation from the American ...”

“... makes the point. The book’s plot is a more routine contraption, bolting together elements of David Lodge and Henning Mankell. Ivan has been brought to Helsinki by Olga Pavlovna, a Russian linguist who wants to display him at a conference to prove her theory of the hybridity and geographical dispersion of the Finno-Ugric languages. Somewhat ...”

“... which is where you’ll be shopping if you decide to follow your dream of becoming the next David Foster Wallace – who did have to work, incidentally, like the rest of us. (At Pomona College, Foster Wallace’s ‘Prose Fiction’ class consisted entirely of getting students to read mass-market bestsellers.) Why are there no great novelists any ...”

“... one of the newer kinds of alienation. ‘Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do,’ David Bowie sang in ‘Space Oddity’, the song that captured something of that strangeness. (It was featured in the BBC’s live coverage of the lunar landing.) Bowie, in his spaceman/ androgyne mode, conveyed the idea that space travel could change a man for ...”

“... fringe groups. At the culmination of his triumphant visit to the UK last month, Modi, addressing David and a sari-clad Samantha Cameron and a 60,000-strong audience at Wembley Stadium, mentioned, in order to earn multicultural brownie points, one of the icons of the bhakti movement, Kabir, a Muslim weaver’s son, unmindful of Kabir’s distaste for bogus ...”

“... sugar and slaves – from whom is descended one of the National Theatre’s noted actors, David Harewood. When I first showed People to the director Nicholas Hytner he remarked that it wasn’t like anything else I’d done – or anything else I’d done with him. The play, though, that does have hints of it is Getting On (1971), which, like ...”

“... obscuring the fact that our existence has ‘no more meaning than the life of a slime mould’. David Brooks, author of the bestselling pop-science Bildungsroman The Social Animal, explains that his fictional everywoman ‘Erica’ is slow to trust ‘Harold’ because ‘while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on the basis of fertility cues ...”