“... Leishman rendered many of the odes into graceful Alcaics and Asclepiads; Christopher Middleton and David Constantine, in contrast, resorted to looser paraphrases. Hamburger takes the more challenging route – with considerable success. The opening lines of ‘Bread and Wine’ catch the rhythm and flow of Hölderlin’s distichs: Round us the town is at ...”

“... gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic struck them as fairly ...”

“... He is right about that. They would also notice some strange inclusions: for example, essays on David Frost, Kenneth Clark, Tom Wolfe and Germaine Greer – Sixties figures to a man. Booker’s earlier book, The Neophiliacs, he tells us, was ‘a detailed, analytical account of the astonishing changes which had come over Britain in the Fifties and ...”

“... to open a juke joint, and buy a derelict mill from the town’s closeted KKK leader, Hogwood (David Maldonado). The twins enlist their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a sharecropper and precociously talented preacher’s boy who sings and plays the blues, and assemble a crew of old friends and lovers to do up the place, which they call Club Juke.Stack and ...”

“... books are dedicated to husbands who left her widowed: Pierce-Arrow (1999), for the sculptor David von Schlegell, and That This (2010), for the philosopher Peter H. Hare. Nothing in Howe’s work exceeds the sheer beauty of the sequence ‘Rückenfigur’ – an art history term for a figure seen from the back – in Pierce-Arrow. It begins: ‘Iseult ...”

“... history – a moment reached on 20 July 2019, when he recorded 4876 days (exceeding the record of David Ben-Gurion). Netanyahu began the interview by boasting about the extent of American popular support for Israel. Citizens accosted him on trips across the US, hardly any of whom, he insisted with pleasure, were Jews. The subtext was that anyone in their ...”

“... President Reagan’s attention span is known to be brief, and he is said to prefer his memoranda to be limited to a single page. It is therefore unlikely that he will read closely the 640-page report which describes experience of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nevertheless, it would be useful if he – and Mr Brezhnev – were to look through the photographs, which, for the convenience of those who will get no further, have been wisely placed before the text ...”

“... more cheerfully plebeian than the austere embodiment of vertu that appealed to Robespierre or David. Marianne came into her own when it was necessary to find something to replace the portraits of the fallen Emperor, Napoleon III, which had adorned official places. Presidents of the Republic were no substitute. To enthrone them in effigy might give them ...”

“... rest on such evidence as we do possess. The contributors to this volume fulfil both requirements. David Ganz’s deciphering of bureaucratic shorthand in seventh-century Gaul enables him to cast light on the replacement of the Merovingian dynasty by the Carolingians, one of the major shifts in European political history. Patrick Wormald, in an ambitious and ...”

“... and it is the hanging together that matters, not whether there were real people called Moses and David, who may or may not have done this or that. Of course the patterns and fulfilments of the old interpreters were different from Leach’s; the resemblance lies only in that they are concealed, and require to be detected by elaborate methods of ...”

“... great deal of light on the possibilities of reviving written Scots is cast by the festschrift for David Murison, Scotland and the Lowland Tongue. The collection contains a number of pieces of very high quality, which is perhaps not surprising, since few people would want to present anything but their most respectable work to Murison, the wittiest of ...”

“... applications, are even more seriously flawed than the data. One of the Minnesota researchers, David Lykken, wants to prevent low IQ mothers from having children (to ‘reduce the number of low IQ children’). This is, as the twin studied by Neubauer so nicely summed up that project, more ‘Nazi shit’. ‘A lot of social scientists are so scandalised ...”

“... even married her Antony a good few times. The early stages of European portraiture began, the late David Piper suggested in his 1992 study, The English Face, with tomb-effigies in the 12th century. Neither beauty nor individuality were the point of these monuments in death to rank, wealth and piety. None of these portraits in stone looks like anyone I have ...”

“... whirlwind trip around European thought, with seven and a half pages on Hegel, one and a bit on David Hume and so on. The Monty Python ‘Summarise Proust’ contest, in which competitors had thirty seconds to deliver a précis, springs irresistibly to mind. Like the motion of desire itself, the book drives remorselessly from one author to another, raiding ...”

“... and easy violence: taverns and clubs seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts it. Strutting and tumbling through it all ...”