“... volumes had included many sentimental or chirpy verses, they had also contained ‘Goliath and David’, a rewriting of the story in Goliath’s favour which anticipates Graves’s many debunkings of history, from My Head, My Head! (1925) to King Jesus (1946), of which Goodbye to All That is one. In the ‘Familiar Letter to Siegfried Sassoon’, written ...”

“... many modern historians recognise. In The Long Shadow, his recent study of the legacy of 1914-18, David Reynolds makes the important point that the bulk of contemporary poetry, far from being anti-war, was fiercely patriotic and positive in tone. It is often forgotten that Wilfred Owen went to his grave in 1918 still resolute that the allied cause was ...”

“... talking to someone who just got more votes than any other politician anywhere in the universe,’ David Cameron told Modi. The BJP took 31 per cent of 550 million votes – barely above the Miliband mark – but the first-past-the-post system Britain bequeathed to India, combined with the strength of regional parties in the east and south, transformed this ...”

“... recordings could have data stripped from them and still sound as good. The information theorist David Huffman had also demonstrated that sonic regularities – a violin string vibrating at a steady pitch, say – could be encoded in such a way that they took up minimal data, then subsequently decoded and expanded into audio information at playback. On the ...”

“... theory with pop culture. He cites Billy Elliot and The Wire alongside Francis Fukuyama and David Harvey to discuss neoliberalism’s corrosion of the postwar social democratic consensus, Game of Thrones alongside Gramsci to illustrate the meaning of power. The book is aimed at the ‘youth without a future’, the generation for whom adult life will ...”

“... by sex, and ended up living with Jardine in a companionable relationship best described – by David Lodge – as a ‘Boston marriage’.) Another effect of her conversion was to bolster the formal daring she’d shown in her first short stories. Broadly speaking, her novels are eager to puncture the conventions of realist fiction, though careful to throw ...”

“... is demonstrated and evil is overcome.’ The German oak came to stand for such victories. Caspar David Friedrich’s The Solitary Tree (1822) shows a battered oak in the foreground, damaged by the storms of the French invasion and the Napoleonic Wars but still in full leaf on its lower branches, providing shelter for a shepherd and his flock. Its loneliness ...”

“... He’s invariably linked with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least ...”

“... he didn’t credit the men and women he met in the East End – ‘a subservient lot’, he told David Marquand years later – with his conversion to socialism. That may have already been underway but would be shaped by his work teaching in the industrial north.His quarrel with Oxford in a sense drove him there. In 1905, Tawney joined the newly formed ...”

“... a majority in the Parliament in 2011; the mobilising effects of the independence referendum; David Cameron’s decision (presumably well prepared) to use the result as an excuse to push for ‘English votes for English measures’, which allowed the SNP to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. From that moment, as Scottish MPs knew, Labour was finished ...”

“... was prepared to force the contract on doctors regardless of whether the BMA agreed to it. David Cameron said last month that junior doctors could not be allowed to ‘block progress in our NHS’. Whose NHS? The government has done everything it can to make it seem as if its main concern is with reducing weekend mortality rates, but even if that were ...”

“... years after my initial request. We got heavily redacted copies of the two 2010 legal opinions by David Barron and Marty Lederman making the case that it was legal and constitutional to kill Awlaki. It is a dark twist to this story that Barron and Lederman owed their positions in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to ‘their scathing ...”

“... deaths in lost causes: that of Sir John Franklin in his vain search for the North-West Passage, David Livingstone’s fruitless missions to the Zambesi, and Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed mission to the South Pole. All these deaths were indeed flawed: Franklin’s by the large number of people who died looking for him and by the cannibalism to which his ...”

“... so on. Then he returns with elliptical reports from which the tribe’s younger storytellers, from David Foster Wallace on, set about extracting a style and a tone attuned to new ways of feeling and not feeling. One constant throughout these risk-filled spirit voyages has been DeLillo’s superbly take-it-or-leave-it posture towards the laity. ‘The writer ...”

“... with this. He talked it over with his wife and with Bob Deitz, the NSA’s lawyer. Deitz asked David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, for a copy of the legal opinion backing up the White House’s argument. Addington, Hayden writes, refused to share it, though he was gracious enough to ‘read some of the operative paragraphs over the ...”