“... to jack up share prices was to sack people. To pluck an example from my own experience, when Mr David Montgomery was appointed chief executive of the Daily Mirror in 1992, he was immediately showered with share options. The price of the shares was relatively low at the time because the Mirror was doing rather well. It had no proprietor. A year ...”

“... mother, a young woman from Chicago, and befriended a handsome doctor’s son called Prince Jones, whose untimely death at the hands of the police functions as the moral fulcrum of the book. Coates then writes of his early years of struggle as a freelance journalist, but says little of his subsequent triumphs at the Atlantic, where since 2008 he has ...”

“... her remotely right. They included Chris Patten, John Patten, William Waldegrave and Tristan Garel-Jones, and were soon to be joined by John Major. In the pamphlet they used as an epigraph a line from Macmillan: ‘We have at least the most important thing of all at the head of our government, a prime minister of courage, who I hope will not be led away from ...”

“... trained in his London studio, including William Marlow, Joseph Farington and, best of all, Thomas Jones and William Hodges. Unlike Gainsborough, who took off from the tradition of Dutch landscape painting, in Rome Wilson became a follower of the school of Claude Lorrain, more classically Arcadian in its subjects and atmosphere, more expansive in its ...”

“... beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the distressed. Sterne assured his readers that his purpose in A Sentimental Journey (1768) ‘was to teach us to love the world and our fellow ...”

“... comes into sight again when the ‘outstretched arms mechanically generated from each other’ in David’s ‘Oath of the Horatii’ are said to be (or at least have placed next to them, in apposition) ‘duplication which leads through democratic crowds to totalitarian unison’. I thought this was coming it a bit. There are only three outstretched arms in ...”

“... Killer. A white man scalped. A white man disappeared, a white boy kidnapped. It was Biblical, David v. Goliath. But Wilson was disturbed by that.’ It’s a way of writing that recalls the staccato beat of three-dot journalism, and Alexie’s reliance on it suggests that he is trying to put everything simply and clearly, so that readers don’t make the ...”

“... book; her first books had been biographies, of her father’s famous family and of Edward Burne-Jones. She was 62 when she won the Booker, a widow and the mother of three grown-up children, and although no longer in straits as desperate as those she had drawn on for the novel, she was accustomed to making do on very little. She lived on the ground floor of ...”

“... aren’t up to the task: he especially has it in for wind, quoting the dismaying statistic from David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air that a four-kilometre-wide belt of offshore windfarms all the way round the coast of Britain would provide less than an eighth of Britons’ average daily energy consumption (according to ...”

“... where they dine with his new colleagues from Brandeis. Sontag has given birth to a son, David. She studies for masters’ degrees in literature and philosophy at Harvard. Herbert Marcuse boards in their house. The tone is one of new maturity in a high-toned world, but there are also floods of tears, feelings of imprisonment, the need to die or ...”

“... but also want to read about not-quite Tony Parsons’s head being burst to bits between copies of David Lodge’s Consciousness and the Novel and The History of Roget’s Thesaurus. Some of this can be put down to the impure nature of satire itself, which appeals almost exclusively to the dark side. Is there another genre that depends on a character flaw for ...”

“... in point would be The Elephant Man (1980), a still from which appears on the cover of the book. David Lynch’s film may indeed demonstrate ‘time-worn points of view’ in some ways, and its central figure may indeed combine the stereotypes of the Sweet Innocent and the Saintly Sage (Norden is inordinately fond of categories like these and the ‘Elderly ...”

“... you read “In Defence of Convention T”?’ The very plainness of his name (often transmuted to David Donaldson) lent an aura of mystique to the plosive economy of the Davidson corpus. And the man himself, with his startling blue eyes and precisely articulated mode of speech, his unhurried confidence, his immersion in his own vision, his neatness, certainly ...”

“... which jumped around all over the place when he talked – which was a great deal of the time’. David Gascoyne described in his journal in 1936 how Jennings dominated a meeting of the English Surrealists, ‘as usual … boiling over with energy and excitement’. He reported, too, the scene when Jennings and Tom Harrisson met to discuss the formation of ...”

“... evidence of the Hills’ reliability.The UFO Incident, a film about the Hills, starring James Earl Jones as Barney and Estelle Parsons as Betty, was broadcast by NBC in October 1975, bringing their story to millions of American households. It suited the paranoid mood of the times. Two weeks after watching it, Travis Walton, a forestry worker, was reported ...”