“... and fiction. Fitzgerald shared with his hero Gatsby an untimely death and barely attended funeral. David Brown’s thorough biography, Paradise Lost, emphasises that Fitzgerald lived with the constant tension between the desire to be a ‘whole man’ and the recognition of its impossibility. His life was full of drama and destruction: reckless spending, high ...”

“... draw well. Mark Rothko has ‘severe limitations as a draughts man’, as does Milton Avery; David Smith is ‘very uneven’, Magritte straightforwardly poor. Hughes’s tendency to argue both sides achieves poignancy in his famous, and well-deserved, attack on Julian Schnabel: ‘in Schnabel,’ he charges, ‘our time of insecure self-congratulation ...”

“... Party stalwarts in various parts of England where the issue of Europe remains charged. David Cameron’s position as leader seems increasingly questioned by sections of his party who want a speedy referendum on whether the UK should remain within the EU, and many of his backbenchers make little distinction between the Council of Europe (and its ...”

“... The Western Canon, as though its author – and its editor, since the book has been assembled by David Mikics from pieces written over the past half-century – was provoked by the reaction to his earlier book into seeing a wider world of writing. There are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert ...”

“... genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by ...”

“... that the Leatherstocking series (the five novels that feature Natty Bumppo) were the first vital embodiment of the new consciousness underpinning American culture. In Natty, Lawrence writes, one finds ‘the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential ...”

“... who was lord chancellor at the time, sought to reduce the length of sentences for serious crimes; David Cameron publicly overruled him. So, despite representing less than half the legal aid budget, civil claims – which are usually claims individuals make to remedy breaches of their rights – bore the brunt of the cuts. The strategy was to remove various ...”

“... doesn’t claim the term) or something else doesn’t matter. Rami gains something vital from witnessing their economic independence, which she helped cultivate. She gets a new sort of pride, to compensate for the loss of the ancestral pride she felt as the only wife – and a chaste one. But losing traditional rewards is never easy. In one ...”

“... and provide the skills base needed by modern industry and commerce.’ To say nothing of Sir David Philips, Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils, who remarked in 1988 that ‘decisions by the Government were “progressively leading to an unstable situation”.’ Fighting words, no doubt, but they have the unmistakably musty smell of ...”

“... he hastened to restore the case for America’s involvement to a higher plane by reverting to the vital need to halt ‘aggression’. Despite this new higher tone, the issue of oil continued to intrude in the public discussion. Although oil was something all Americans could understand, its significance as an issue ultimately depended on the prejudices of the ...”

“... The Foreign Office, which is responsible for MI6, has explained that the Cumming diaries remain so vital to national security that not a single sentence in them, even as far back as 1909, can be declassified. Indeed the Foreign Office goes further. It concludes that it may never be possible to reveal either details of Sir Mansfield’s pre-1914 disguises or ...”

“... were insights in Wallace’s treatment of divergence which Darwin could turn to advantage. As David Kohn observed in a cogent dismissal of Brackman2, it is first necessary to distinguish between divergence as a purely taxonomic conception and divergence as an explanatory principle, integral to the dynamics of natural selection. Both Darwin and Wallace ...”

“... spheres. English and Welsh Protestantism remained divided between church and chapel, with the vital consequence that religious and then political pluralism became embedded in national identity. All this was the fault of the Prayer Book’s return in 1662. Yet even when, in the 18th century, an increasingly powerful ‘new dissent’ appeared in the form ...”

“... unburrowed and Abercrombie moved east to rebuild Hong Kong. The name ‘Crossrail’ was coined by David Barran, a monocle-wearing, snuff-snorting industrialist, in a 1974 report drawn up at the request of the Department of the Environment. Barran, like Abercrombie, proposed two tunnels, one from London Bridge to Victoria, the other from Paddington to ...”

“... nicer than she was, and they weren’t interested in the possibility that her meanness could be a vital energy in her writing. (Only men are allowed that privilege.) Not that I always saw that myself: I was increasingly in two minds about her. She was quite often rude and difficult and it wasn’t always fascinating. One night we went to the theatre, and had ...”