“... in Axler’s proposed salvation-by-child, or by love or sex (‘He who forms a tie is lost’ – David Kepesh’s friend George O’Hearn, telling it straight in The Dying Animal). They won’t save him, and nor will solitude: it’s the absence of ties which has brought him to this pass. Axler has no family: no memories of dear Morty Sabbath to stay his ...”

“... the Paris Review, McSweeney’s and the New Yorker. He is also a journalist, specialising, like David Foster Wallace, in first-person-singular expeditions into curious reaches of American culture. Tower’s non-fiction adventures have included a bicycle odyssey along the New Orleans levee a year after Hurricane Katrina, a search for a possibly extinct ...”

“... only five other women in total (there were 60 men). She has seldom been included since. In 1970, David Shapiro and Ron Padgett’s anthology An Anthology of New York Poets left her out, but by then the so-called ‘second generation’ looked very different, and little of their style or substance can be traced to Guest’s influence. In Women, the New York ...”

“... and its bitterest opponent, Porter’s publisher and the Sierra Club’s executive director, David Brower, to float together down the Grand Canyon below the dam, arguing all the way. Neither of them imagined the fate the dam now faces. But others hoped. Two classics, or maybe three. The insurrectionary environmental writer Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The ...”

“... By the end it was clear that Gordon was safe, but it was a close-run thing. If Alan Johnson or David Miliband had jumped ship, the game would have been well and truly up. The hope is that we can make it to the summer recess without any more calamities. After that, who ...”

“... of East and West alike. This other Ransome was, I think, first brought to public attention by David Caute in The Fellow Travellers (1973), then by Hugh Brogan in his 1984 biography, more recently in papers declassified by MI5 in 2005, and now by Roland Chambers in this new biography. It should be said at once that the bulk of the evidence was never ...”

“... Party does have a libertarian tradition and some belief in the free-born Englishman, whom David Davis surprisingly and quixotically left the front bench to defend. But it’s a tradition more likely to protect people’s pleasures than their rights, and Thatcherism, which was anything but libertarian, almost killed it off. Where these conflicting ...”

“... teacher Leopold Kronecker reviled it as ‘humbug’ and ‘mathematical insanity’, whereas David Hilbert declared: ‘No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.’ Bertrand Russell recalled in his autobiography that he ‘falsely supposed’ all Cantor’s ‘arguments to be fallacious’, only later realising that ‘all ...”

“... blusters and bungles away, the Peter Principle made flesh. Other ministers – Alan Milburn, David Blunkett, Stephen Byers – briefly shoot skywards, flare and fizzle. Through the passing show Mullin is by turns wryly amused and appalled, but often just alienated, a Meursault of the red boxes. Despite his Bennite past, the alienation is not mainly ...”

“... During the break-up with Kimberly Quinn that precipitated his break-up with the Home Office, David Blunkett is reported to have warned her: ‘The law is on my side. I know because I made the law.’ It doesn’t quite have the melodramatic chill of Judge Dredd’s ‘I am the law,’ but it comes close. And it’s easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office ...”

“... aptly termed the ‘crispation de nerfs’ in the painter’s work. In 1985, one art historian, David Lubin, turned the picture into an occasion for some psychosexual fantasising. Lubin also tried to answer the riddle Sargent had posed by deviating from a main source for the picture: Velázquez’s Las Meninas, one of ten works by Velázquez he copied on a ...”

“... of the latter, as you know, and he thought it was very good but he finally decided to acquire from David Godine, the American publisher who holds the copyright to both current translations, their version of The Prospector … Ravi knows Sue Berger (who worked for Godine) well, because they used to be colleagues in London when both were working for Penguin and ...”

“... Rogers, Ingrid Bergman and Mary Pickford joined a committee to welcome her to Hollywood, where David O. Selznick sponsored an evening in her honour during which the Los Angeles Philharmonic played ‘The Madame Chiang Kai-shek March’. (As she was travelling west, the inhabitants of one small town lined up to see her when her train stopped to take on ...”

“... Roth’s scheme. In the exhilarating opening pages of The Dying Animal, the exuberant 62-year-old David Kepesh, ever ‘vulnerable to female beauty’, has evaded retribution for abandoning his wife and child many years before and, largely thanks to the genius that won him a professorship and regular appearances on radio and TV, has been able to enjoy a life ...”

“... in Assad’s inner circle feared that Syria would be next). According to Assad’s biographer David Lesch, ‘Damascus wanted the Bush doctrine to fail, and it hoped that Iraq would be the first and last time it was applied. Anything it could do to ensure this outcome, short of incurring the direct military wrath of the United States, was considered fair ...”