“... be able to take for granted could see for himself or herself the truth of the matter,’ he told David Sexton, somewhat sternly. T.S. Eliot once said that genuine poetry could ‘communicate before it is understood’, though that doesn’t preclude understanding it too: it might seem a generous thing to say that the poetry in some way communicates its ...”

“... grove on Skyros: it was ‘as though one were involved in the origin of some classical myth’, F.S. Kelly, who would survive until the Somme, noted in his diary. Brooke and his fellow officers, all public schoolboys who’d studied Greek, had been carried away by the Homeric echoes of their journey: ‘Do you think perhaps the fort on the Asiatic corner ...”

“... iced water, was a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you ...”

“... in vain for Quddus Ali to regain consciousness. Even the nail-bomb planted in Brick Lane by David Copeland in April 1999 didn’t check their will to reclaim the streets of Whitechapel. How strange then that this novel, part of it set in 1985, has so little to say about the campaign of violence and intimidation which marked the lives of almost every ...”

“... not the rebel as Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace plus army, but the rebel as Sid Vicious or David Bowie. For many Scots, self-determination, rather than nationalism, remains the cause. Now, 35 years later, were I living in Scotland, I’d vote yes to independence, despite the short-term economic problems it would bring, and despite Salmond’s ...”

“... hero of Balzac and Stendhal, the figure in Henry James confronting her destiny, Madame Bovary or David Copperfield or even Moby Dick now became the unread or the unwritten book or the newly discovered passage, or the section where the author has lost control, or given up. In Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet our hero muses: ‘Why should I care that no one ...”

“... and roadless places, and corruption and incompetence galore. The current conservative senator, David Vitter, has been mixed up with prostitutes while preaching family values; the Democratic congressman from New Orleans had to resign after he was found to have an unexplained $90,000 in his freezer (in an interesting twist, the disarray he created in the ...”

“... is likely, they have paid attention to the discussion of recent studies such as Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s Unjust Rewards (2008) or Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s The Spirit Level (2009).* But what should remain shocking is the way in which the officially endorsed language of ‘aspiration’ occludes the stark facts of economic inequality in ...”

“... aren’t up to the task: he especially has it in for wind, quoting the dismaying statistic from David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air that a four-kilometre-wide belt of offshore windfarms all the way round the coast of Britain would provide less than an eighth of Britons’ average daily energy consumption (according to ...”

“... that they could not be Borked. Stealth has its own dangers. Bush thought he had a neo-con in David Souter, but he had been misinformed. He did a better job the next time. Clarence Thomas had arrived in Washington at the age of 31, and never left the Beltway thereafter, so his neo-con development could be carefully monitored. At 43, he had put in loyal ...”

“... while American forces were importing the same fuel for $1.57 a gallon. Halliburton’s chairman, David Lesar, who took over from Dick Cheney in July 2000, robustly defended his firm. But Waxman raised another question: if Halliburton was being allowed to rip off the Iraqi people, was the Bush administration allowing it to milk the US government as ...”

“... whose name you’re likely to hear among the tarnished tower-blocks of the new town is that of David Coulthard, who is the official patron of the city’s race-circuit down near Highway 15. Sequestered in his lugubrious quarters at Most, Kelley spent some of his time writing. His alchemical treatise, De Lapide Philosophorum, published at Hamburg in ...”

“... massacred there. We scraped off some wads of chewing gum that visitors had stuck on the Star of David (bored Lithuanian schoolchildren, I imagine, engaged in zero-degree desecration), and we said Kaddish for the dead. Before we headed back to town, we stepped into the tiny, one-room excuse for a museum that has been built to commemorate the horrors. There ...”

“... by many readers, but it was nonetheless Milton’s founding intention in composing his epic. As David Norbrook shows in his seminal study Writing the English Republic, the language of chaos and creation briefly took on optimistic overtones during the Commonwealth, but with its disintegration the images became despairing. The Grand Concernments of England ...”

“... Cholmeley, but in each case orchestrated by Thomas Drury. A letter discovered a few years ago by David Riggs further highlights Drury’s involvement, because it shows he had a prior connection with Lord Keeper Puckering. On 8 November 1592 Lord Buckhurst wrote to Puckering: I did speak to Mr Drury according to your Lordship’s desire, and after a long ...”