“... right words, I will never know, because he knows what I do not, how to keep things to himself. David Sedaris had invited me to read alongside him that night at UCLA, but before that we had the whole day. We took a cab first to Venice Beach, so that Jason could pay homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘Remember when he says that he feels the pump and it’s ...”

“... the same term to the ritual obscenities of bottle-throwing soccer fans somehow seems misplaced. David Riches is aware of this incongruity. His symposium contains 11 papers by 11 different authors drawn from the Proceedings of an ESRC-funded conference held at St Andrews University in January 1985. The violence under ...”

“... young Russian couple – Yulia and Vitaly Stepanov – who helped expose a vast doping conspiracy. David Walsh, a sports journalist for the Times with a good record of uncovering cheats (he wrote about his role in exposing Lance Armstrong in his previous book, Seven Deadly Sins), tells their story with the breathless drive of an airport thriller. The ...”

“... is silence, or rather, the rest should be another (and conceivably much more memorable) story. David Hughes’s The Pork Butcher is a worthy winner of the W.H. Smith award, the latest of the series of literary prizes awarded to novels published in 1984. In this, his ninth novel, Hughes has written a moral fable, brief, sensational, and hauntingly ...”

“... next general election will be fought by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Leader of the Opposition David Cameron we do know; but how it will be fought we don’t, in part because the present prime minister will not disclose when he intends to go. Furthermore, both Cameron and Brown are in some senses, but for different reasons, unknown quantities. Cameron ...”

“... circles and scenes.One place where this crossover logic was always embraced was the Loft, run by David Mancuso. On any given night, the playlist might include club hits like Taana Gardner’s ‘Heartbeat’, the Peech Boys’ ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ or Fingers Inc’s ‘Mystery of Love’; but you’d also likely hear Marianne Faithfull and Yoko ...”

“... and the tension keeps slackening into comedy. A small band of criminals led by Clive Owen has held up a bank in lower Manhattan and taken some forty hostages. Are they after the diamonds? Money? The banker’s Nazi papers? Something else? There are plenty of plot twists, but the comedy is much better than the tension was ever going to be. A boy is playing ...”

“... of the original Khoisan population. But Fifa dictates that World Cup semi-finals can’t be held in stadiums with fewer than 65,000 seats and it wasn’t possible to enlarge either of the two at Newlands or the Athlone stadium to that size. The city had also wanted originally to locate the stadium in a black or Coloured area, both in order to encourage ...”

“... essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen declares Pynchon a personal hero. David Foster Wallace moves beyond admiration to adulation – if not, to put it more plainly, outright imitation. It is, in fact, a virtuoso performance that has eclipsed its progenitor: Wallace out-Pynchons Pynchon, and his third book, Infinite Jest, may well be ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... Greater London Council, made the speculative proposal, in 1979, that the 1988 Olympics should be held at the Royal Victoria Dock in Silvertown, right alongside Bow Creek, the point of access to the Lower Lea, he was ridiculed by the man who succeeded him, Ken Livingstone. ‘A gimmick’. A megalomaniac right-wing fantasy. By 2008, in a frank admission ...”

“... had a wrestling match in the dark and I got the upper hand and I crushed this person’s trachea. Held him down while he died. And then got up. I beat and strangled someone to death in a tunnel, in the dark. But that wasn’t the only casualty. The other casualty was the civilised version of me.The five voices I have mentioned so far among the eighty in the ...”

“... central paradoxes of Victorian Britain: namely, that while the highest office in the country was held by a woman, political life was almost exclusively a male preserve. She reminds us that Victoria was brought up in a domestic, female-dominated environment, but that after 1837 she was obliged to deal publicly with men, who were also very much better educated ...”

“... difficulties’? It had better be a lot, since a lot is looked for now. Those who long held de Man’s criticism in special esteem are in the position of having to offer him as a political or historical critic of some sort, because, just at the moment, that is the way to make a critic presentable. Here lies the interest of Romanticism and ...”

“... was because he found the answer I have just quoted that he was able to act as he did. Ambition had held him back, not driven him on. He had to transcend it before he could make the leap which may yet turn out to have transformed British ...”