“... Like Eggers (whose memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was puffed by Moody), David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann, Moody spurns the eye-dropper technique of minimalism that was fashionable when he was a nervous colt in the 1980s in favour of a bachelor-guy pack-rat approach where everything the author has ever seen, read, felt or ...”

“... writings, Paul Keen has edited the Reformists’ Register for Pickering and Chatto (2003), and David Kent and D.R. Ewen have published, with Wayne State University Press, a generous selection of his satires and letters (2002). But no one has told the story of the trials more grippingly than Wilson, or conveyed better the extraordinary atmosphere in the ...”

“... not only needing applause, but needing (badly needing) other people to have a little less of it. David Frost once asked him what he wished he’d known at 20. ‘To hold my tongue,’ Gielgud said. ‘I’ve talked too much, gossiped too much.’ The fear of gossip can run a life, and sometimes ruin one; Michael Redgrave was an actor powered by ...”

“... should be ‘exaltation’, although it is hard to be sure. Referring to ‘the historian David Irving’ is like referring to the metallurgist Uri Geller. There were, I think, few ballpoint pens in 1940. On page 160 the idea that the USA passed straight from barbarism to decadence is praised as if it had been conceived by Muggeridge, instead of Oscar ...”

“... worth going a little into the general question of why Lowland Scots, as different in pedigree as David Daiches, the film-maker Bill Douglas, Jimmy Boyle and Anne Smith, should be so determined to rake over and publicly display their childhoods (all more or less deprived childhoods, though in Daiches’ case less so from poverty than from an austerely Judaist ...”

“... in grave abuses’. But the British political establishment has shown firm support for Israel. David Cameron, now foreign secretary, said that there was no way Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza, because it is ‘a democracy’ and ‘a country with armed forces that are committed to obeying the rule of law’. On 14 December the UK’s chief of the ...”

“... they included Brian Worthington, a former pupil of Leavis, and, for a short but inspiring time, David Lambert, a man who spoke about poetry and nature with such passion that it was no surprise when he left Clifton to become a gardener. He later c0-founded the Parks Agency and is now a compelling advocate for Extinction Rebellion.Jefferies taught with a ...”

“... disparaged the culture of gift-giving on which that influence seemed to rely. The diplomat David Urquhart’s neurosis about Russian influence at Constantinople derived from his failure to persuade Ottoman officials to accept his proposals for a free-trade treaty; his Eurocentric perspective led him to smell a Russian plot. Britain used its naval power ...”

“... Do you wake amid a sigh.           Radio sighs AM,             FM.               Shortwave sighs crackle in from the Atlantic.           Hot sighs steam in the dawn.    People kissing stop to sigh then kiss again.Doctors sigh into wounds and the bloodstream is changed for ...”

“... Lega was already in another far-right grouping). The ECR had been the creature of the Tories since David Cameron turned his back on the mainstream conservative European Peoples Party (EPP), historically the driving force of European integration. But Brexit meant that the Conservatives didn’t contest the 2019 European election. This was another stroke of luck ...”

“... folks in all parts of the world.’ These connections have been discussed more recently by David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen in The Kaiser’s Holocaust (2010), and by Juergen Zimmerer in From Windhoek to Auschwitz? (2019). The links between the genocide in South-West Africa and the Holocaust depend on something else that Zimmerer makes clear: the ...”

“... wave of the ‘sexual revolution’, following in the wake of a shoal of similar books, including David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, a highly dubious publication that claimed anything other than the ‘penis-vagina version of sex’ was a perversion, and Nena and George O’Neill’s Open Marriage: A New ...”

“... a bad look). In between, the denunciation of the ‘Unabomber’, Ted Kaczynski, by his brother David in 1996 made many Americans uneasy: against the undoubted ‘good’ of catching a terrorist was the ‘bad’ of snitching on his own family, something uncomfortably close to the Pavlik Morozov story. Then, in 1998, came the scandal of Monica Lewinsky’s ...”

“... and political one.An epigraph to one section of Saraswati quotes an American administrator called David E. Lilienthal, writing soon after Partition, who suggested that the Indus pays no heed to borders but ‘just keeps running along’. Lilienthal was head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which may explain the slightly blurred quotation from ‘Ol’ Man ...”