“... normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of decades, the ...”

“... as with Ruth Ellis, the last woman executed in England, there is an evil, compelling genius – David Blakeley, murdered by her as her only escape – or, as with Myra Hindley, an evil, compelling ‘mad’ genius, Ian Brady, virtually taking over her soul by making her do the most unimaginable harm to innocent children. Women’s crimes or even ...”

“... names,’ Amis confides at one point, ‘it’s amazing how it lowers . . . the tone’ (Lord David ‘Cess-hole’, for example). Getting the tone down to sewer-level became an end in itself, with much verbal japing along the way: ‘Fucky Nell’, ‘a bit of an R-scrawler’ and so on. Above all, the Amis-Larkin correspondence was an abattoir ...”

“... of the price war’s principal targets. (‘Don’t worry about the Telegraph,’ Murdoch told Sir David English of Associated Newspapers in 1993. ‘Leave them to me. I’ll put them out of business for you.’) Knowing that Black knew Murdoch socially, my friend asked him if he had ever brought up the subject of the price war. Black shook his head. He ...”

“... lambent dullness played around his face’) – satire as longing, as true poetry. David Nichol Smith said: ‘He could not have given us our greatest epic; but he is our greatest satirist.’ Pope, who offers some strong competition, must have learned from Dryden the interaction of these two ideas. The gift in the older poet that provokes this ...”

“... land weapon. But for it to succeed a spate of quite new strategic concepts was needed. For J.F.C. Fuller, ‘the War of 1914-18 was a blind evolution from mass to machine fighting, for whereas mass by multiplying numbers begets defensive power, machines by enhancing mobility beget offensive power.’ Fuller had joined the Tank Corps in France, at ...”

“... forestall their [defection] or to cover their trail.’ Perhaps. Yet it was the British Communist David Crook who did most of the spying on the Orwells – and, according to Gordon Bowker in his biography of Orwell, Crook went on to suggest that Eileen was having an affair with Kopp. The snakepit from which the Orrs scrambled when they left for France was ...”

“... for it.’ This from the author of The Logic of Political Economy, an exposition of the ideas of David Ricardo, which John Stuart Mill, for one, thought ‘very successful’. He wouldn’t have needed to owe rent on multiple rooms and houses, had it not been that the landlords held his drafts and papers hostage as collateral for his debts. Things improved ...”

“... Saudi-UAE effort to counter what they present as Iranian influence. As Richard Sokolsky and Aaron David Miller put it in an article for Politico, The crown prince engineered this dispute not to punish Qatar for its financing of terrorism (a hypocritical comment coming from the Saudis, whose own citizens have provided funding to radical extremists over the ...”

“... strange being alone with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in ...”

“... in Paris with Jane Bowles and Martha Gellhorn; in Grasse and California she cooked and ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained ...”

“... onto something that has paucity at the heart of it,’ Saunders says in a conversation with David Sedaris included at the end of Tenth of December.Why is his work – winner of the Booker Prize, lauded in every conceivable quarter – still attended by the scent of failure? It must be, in order that he can overcome. At some point, the source of ...”

“... Ghanaians, Communist Party etc.’ There wasn’t much truth in these claims. ‘At its height,’ David Gibbs writes in The Political Economy of Third World Intervention (1991), ‘the communist intervention in the Congo comprised no more than 380 Soviets and Czechoslovaks – against 14,000 UN troops and many thousands of Belgian military ...”

“... of being tickled to death. The damage is the digitised version of the Hollywood experience, which David Mamet once characterised as ‘like the beginning of a love affair: full of surprises and you’re constantly getting ...”

“... remaking society according to their lights.In 2022 the billionaires William Oberndorf and David Sacks, former COO of PayPal, pumped money into a successful recall campaign against Boudin, shortly after his election as district attorney. A total of $7 million was donated to the effort, 80 per cent of it in amounts of $50,000 or more, $600,000 from ...”