“... to peel off the catsuit in her marital bed. For her first Rolling Stone cover, aged seventeen, David LaChapelle shot her in a bra and hot pants, one arm around a Teletubby doll. Lynne was horrified; Britney asked LaChapelle to direct her next video. In this period she seemed both omnipotent and obedient, a chronic people-pleaser at the centre of her own ...”

“... a life. It cannot affect our appreciation of Orwell’s art. May I quote from an essay by David Lodge: ‘When I first read “A Hanging” I certainly assumed it was a true story. The more I studied it, the more I suspected that Orwell had added or altered some details for literary effect, but I did not doubt that the piece was essentially factual ...”

“... saintly Bobby.There is no arguing with this kind of junk thinking. It all depends on an auto da fé among the intellectualoids. As he did so brilliantly with Libra a decade ago, Don DeLillo has caught the tone of unwholesome adoration in his aptly-titled Underworld, and put it into the caustic mouth of Lenny Bruce, found here delivering a monologue during ...”

“... Brideshead has been built up is really adequate to the issues at stake. Conservative writers like David Watkin, Roger Scruton and, to a lesser extent recently, Gavin Stamp have worked with impressive zeal to see that every wretched tower block in the land is listed as a national monument to the reforming ambitions of 1945. They have also presented themselves ...”

“... atomised medley which leaves the impression of a kind of collage.’ In Britain, Classic FM has contrived, perhaps even set out, to exaggerate this effect. It broadcasts music as though it were a piece of fabric to be unrolled, one pattern succeeding another without acknowledgment of the differences between them. On Classic ...”

“... have had. Russian crime and corruption are also a worry for the West, however. Handelman quotes David Veness, head of Scotland Yard’s Organised Crime Unit, at a conference in 1993: ‘In five years’ time I have absolutely no doubt the major threats confronting the inner cities of the United Kingdom will be Central and Eastern European and Russian ...”

“... We learn a great deal about his visual passions, for the 17th-century Dutch painters, for Caspar David Friedrich (Two Men Contemplating the Moon was part of the inspiration for Waiting for Godot) and, supremely, Cézanne (a late self-portrait attracted the quintessentially Beckettian description ‘overwhelmingly sad. A blind broken old man’). Cronin, on ...”

“... the errant young man from the Singapore Stock Exchange, is interviewed in his Frankfurt prison by David Frost, the interview, made by Frost’s production company, broadcast by the BBC at ten this evening. The papers, which have had a preview, are full of Leeson’s self-justifications, but nobody seems to question the propriety of broadcasting such an ...”

“... opposite of what they mean, and it is this more than anything that makes the new Unionist leader David Trimble look so angry. When John Major told the House of Commons that it ‘would turn his stomach’ to negotiate with Gerry Adams, he meant exactly the opposite, and when this became clear, there was a fuss, but no one really minded too much because ...”

“... I don’t know about the robot duck, yet. But the Giant Beetroot comes straight from something in David Hume.This method, it should be obvious, has nothing to do with the weakly whacky. It caricatures, it counterfactualises and it reductio-ad-absurdums. But it does so in strict relation to real historical sources, in an oddly angled, yet almost geometrically ...”

“... Left, ‘had the novelist’s gift of telling lies’, and it seems that Roth had it too. Until David Bronsen established the facts in his German-language biography (an English translation is in progress), the record of Roth’s life was an evocative smudge, a rumour worthy of the shadowy border town in which he was born – a town about which, in different ...”

“... as apparently happened to the most sceptical Andersen partner, Carl Bass. In February 1999, David Duncan, the partner in charge of its dealings with Enron, told the latter’s audit committee that ‘Obviously, we are on board with all of these’ – Enron’s accountancy practices – ‘but many push limits and have a high “others could have a ...”

“... calls this the standard ‘quagmire school’ approach to the Vietnam War, led by people like David Halberstam and Arthur Schlesinger. The problem is that a close scrutiny of classified documents will not bear it out: ‘For Kennedy, as for Johnson, in fact, it was the President who was deceiving the public, not his subordinates who were deceiving ...”

“... employment. Aimed primarily at Asia and Central/Eastern Europe, the scheme was commended by David Blunkett as proof that the Government was ‘delivering nothing less than one of the world’s most flexible modern work permit systems. To maintain a buoyant economy we need to ensure employers can quickly fill key posts where shortages exist.’ This ...”

“... wrote, ‘heavily flawed’, though he refused to be shocked by it. In 1996 he praisingly reviewed David Cronenberg’s film of Ballard’s book for the Independent on Sunday. There he remembers the ‘flurry of nervous dismay’ that the book had induced in reviewers. Every writer, he says, had a defence against it: ‘I’m not sure if anyone else adopted ...”