“... expound her work through her own body: eternally ‘an athlete of God’, as she herself says; a David before the Ark. Graham’s own book, finished just before she died and burdened with a reluctant acceptance of mortality in its last pages, nevertheless begins briskly: ‘I am a dancer.’ She knew she still was, although she gave her last performance in ...”

“... fifth volume of the Pilgrim letters and Nina Burgis’s introduction to the Clarendon edition of David Copperfield.) But it seems that Dickens first confided the material to Forster in 1847. Forster, of course, had already lined himself up as the great inimitable’s Boswell. There was the tantalising promise that Dickens might write more – a whole ...”

“... not be able to for many years.’ In the March issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, David Albright and Mark Hibbs analysed the situation and found several areas of nuclear weapon technology in which Iraq was deficient quite apart from its lack of usable fissile material. Nothing the IAEA inspectors have found so far in any way suggests that Iraq ...”

“... some twenty years ago, the need for an abridged version of SND (the editor of that dictionary, David Murison, wrote to me that by coincidence this had been discussed at the last meeting of the dictionary council, and referred for further consideration), I never expected that my wishes would be met so sumptuously. Since it has been the Year of the Woman for ...”

“... were cut back and even more serious that supplies of arms and ammunition ... were interrupted.’ David Smith, the Rhodesian Finance Minister, advised his leader that Rhodesia was virtually broke: ‘There wert almost noforeign exchange reserves. Without an infusion of soft loans, Rhodesiacould neither pay for the war, nor keep industry supplied ... nor cope ...”

“... the tremendous fact that I own the entire love of the rarest man who ever lived [Dickinson] ... David [her husband] is large enough to see that if he does not answer to me at every point and another does it’s not his fault, nor mine, nor the other’s ... It is a dangerous doctrine for the masses, but one in a thousand can understand it.’ Such passages ...”

“... a major field for contemporary epic and romance. In his really excellent book, After the Raj, David Rubin makes clear, perhaps inadvertently, the difficulties for a novelist of seizing what he can use and handle from that enormous area, and possessing it as his own ‘world’. It is here that the Celtic magic, if it can be conjured up, has its great ...”

“... looks a little like an old, obsessional theme if you think of Gabe Wallach in Letting go or of David Kepesh in The Breast and The Professor of Desire. The ordeal of an unhallowed existence is really what Portnoy’s complaining about, too.Are you complaining about it – is that why it’s an old, obsessional theme?Obsessional themes evolve from ...”

“... virtues, however, Austen Morgan diverges less from the standard biography (published in 1977 by David Marquand, now of the Social Democratic Party) than his Marxian perspectives might lead one to expect; he does not even put the case of MacDonald’s critics when he decided on a strategy of respectability on taking office in 1924. What he has done is to ...”

“... the sublime in landscape gardening was always on the brink of the ridiculous. Brown’s friend David Garrick, to whom he suggested making a tunnel under the road to connect the two parts of his Thames-side grounds, may have been the first person to satirise it on stage in Lethe, or Aesop in the Shades in 1757, in which Lord Chalkstone, played by Garrick ...”

“... the ones at Bobby Van’s. The core included Vogel, Puzo, Friedman, Brooks and the screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. Kurt Vonnegut began to show up. Peter Matthiessen was considered but rejected for mentioning too often his membership in the Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘It’s an organisation,’ Puzo said, ‘for guys who can’t get screen ...”

“... civility – attended by men and women anxious to ‘improve’ – rather than of vice. He begged David Garrick to cancel a revival of The Beggar’s Opera at Drury Lane on the grounds that it inflamed young men with the ambition to be highwaymen, and sent, ‘every time it is acted, one additional thief to the gallows’. These efforts did ...”

“... of the rapid mass privatisations of the 1990s. A 2009 study by a team of epidemiologists led by David Stuckler at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and published in the Lancet found that variations in mortality in post-communist Europe were clearly related to the speed of market reform. Unemployment and widespread insecurity go some way ...”

“... the Latins and the Observer.’ Given that the Observer was owned by Waldorf and edited by her son David, this didn’t make life easy. When another son, Jakie, married a Catholic from Argentina, Nancy refused to attend the wedding. Nancy’s own political life, once so radical, withered away. Fort suggests that she found herself out of sync with the times as ...”

“... one sees, in addition to his old friends Tolkien and Stanley Bennett, such leading Christians as David Knowles, Benedictine monk and ecclesiastical historian, and Basil Willey, lifelong Methodist and member of the literary panel for the translation of the New English Bible. (The electors’ second choice, to whom they offered the chair during Lewis’s ...”