“... between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ground of its ...”

“... all the dashers over the years, from Gerald du Maurier through John Barrymore and Ronald Colman to David Niven. I particularly enjoyed the Yorkshire TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never ...”

“... of adolescent boys who are part of the church. It ends as follows: All during the trip home David seemed preoccupied. When he finally sought out Johnnie he found him sitting by himself on the top deck, shivering a little in the night air. He sat down beside him. After a moment Johnnie moved and put his head on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese history, and ...”

“... critic, but brought to life by him as skilfully as is the even more unpromising Leviticus by David Damrosch. Damrosch begins: ‘Perhaps the greatest problem facing students of the Bible as literature is the fact that so much of the Bible is not literature at all’ – a thought which will occur to most of the few readers Leviticus possesses, and which ...”

“... We adopt, he says, a ‘physical stance’ towards the weather: we treat it as obeying the laws of physics. We adopt a ‘design stance’ towards a computer: we treat it as an object designed to fulfill certain functions. These attitudes enable us to predict at least some aspects of the behaviour of the weather and of computers. The same aim of ...”

“... differences’ they belong to ‘the same human ground-plan’, ‘are moved by the same human laws’. Evans’s first books were prompted by the urgent need to capture the past of a rural society before it disappeared, for mechanisation, particularly in arable country like East Anglia, was bringing about a greater change in farming practice than the ...”

“... by their suffering and the concept elaborated by Hegel that their fate was predetermined by the laws of history. He was the author of some of the most beautiful patriotic lyrics in Polish, and yet he could at the same time write of a universal fatherland: No nation redeemed me, nor created me; I remember eternity before this age; The Key of ...”

“... according to which ‘former Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians everything at Camp David, but they wanted even more.’ So where did the handful of members of the radical Left go? They voted for the Democratic Front (the Communist Party and others), or for Balad, Dr Azmi Bishara’s Arab nationalist party. Most remained secluded inside the ...”

“... couples) were able to maintain separate establishments, especially after the passage of the Poor Laws at the beginning of the 17th century. There was considerable variation within these patterns. The land-owning classes departed from the nuclear family model: since ‘impartible’ inheritance was usual (the estate descending intact to the eldest son), they ...”

“... chose to file a libel suit against Grunewald. What followed turned into the political trial of David Ben-Gurion and his party, to which Kastner belonged. Grunewald was acquitted. Kastner, the German-born judge wrote, ‘had sold his soul to the devil’. In Zertal’s view this was the beginning of Ben-Gurion’s downfall. Worn out by the scandal, he ...”

“... has advocated ‘home rule all round’ in a new federal union. A similar call has come from David Melding, the Conservative deputy presiding officer of the Welsh Assembly, in The Reformed Union: The UK as a Federation, published last year; while Conservatives at Westminster, including Kenneth Baker, Malcolm Rifkind and members of the so-called Democracy ...”

“... Craig has been signed up for the American remake of the first film, which will be directed by David Fincher. The quest to find Lisbeth Salander took on Scarlett O’Hara proportions; the role has been filled with attendant fanfare by Rooney Mara, who was introduced to the world in Fincher’s last movie, The Social Network. (It will be interesting to see ...”

“... who gained international notoriety, mostly through celebrated trials: Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Ericka Huggins, Elaine Brown. But rather than focusing on the sensationalist and salacious aspects of the party’s history – the confrontations, violence, criminality – Bloom and Martin choose to recount ...”