“... at the world from within double-glazed, centrally-heated rooms permeates many of these novels. Davies’s sketch of a character in The Element of Water could stand as a warning to all modern narrators: ‘Quantz, trained in the Canaris school of Intelligence but long returned to the Navy, couldn’t quite slough his habit of cynical observation.’ The ...”

“... in these attitudes which was all-important and which, as I noted above, is passed over. Judy Davies makes one of the most convincing contributions in her survey of Marinetti and early Fascism. Even as her fine chapter appears, Marinetti and Boccioni seem to be coming back into fashion. The piece on ‘sexual politics and the avant-garde’, on the other ...”

“... the extraordinary sums of money involved,1 were quickly followed by the prosecution in Britain of Michael Collier. Chairman of Morgan Grenfell, the largest securities firm in the City of London, for making an instantaneous profit of £15,000 on the purchase of shares in a company he knew was about to be taken over. A steady series of cases involving ...”

“... Third – or is that Fourth? – Way text for the coming century. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury won the 1989 Smartie Prize for juvenile fiction. Bear Hunt, as policy intellectuals familiarly call it, is the ‘unlikely starting point’ for an answer to the query Leadbetter poses in his opening chapter: ‘How to find ...”

“... man has no ready buttress for his self-regard. That historian is fictional: he is the narrator of Michael Young’s 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy. But the only thing significantly off the mark about his dystopian predictions is that his narrator is saying these things, as opposed to merely thinking them. Mount’s Uppers do, broadly speaking, think ...”

“... by Mr Ponting, of the meeting on 30 March 1984 to decide how to answer the letters from Denzil Davies and myself, dated 19 March. It got going just before 10 a.m. and lasted until nearly one o’clock. Anyone who knows Michael Heseltine knows that he is a rapid dispatcher of business, even by senior ministerial ...”

“... advocate. My own hunch is that other Gurney personae usually written off as lunatic fictions – Michael Flood, Frederick Saxby, Valentine Fane, Griffiths Davies and so on: there were many – may yet turn out to be comrades from the trenches, those other persons he so loved. Although writing of place-names rather than ...”

“... Beer tells substantially the same story but names the friend who issued the challenge: Acton Davies, an admirer of Zola and a writer for New York’s Evening Sun. They were in the studio of the painter William Dallgren, who was painting a portrait of Davies (maybe). Out with ...”

“... their dole is reduced correspondingly.’ In Solidarity on the Waterfront, a docker called Jimmy Davies recalls starting work at the age of 18 in 1960: At that time they were still operating a casual system and I went into pen number eight, which dealt with all the coastal traffic to Ireland. There were about 2000 men in that control area and the boss would ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... by Retrographic: History’s Most Exciting Images Transformed into Living Colour, edited by Michael D. Carroll (Carpet Bombing Culture, £19.95) – is a marker of our level of estrangement. Take Marina Amaral’s brilliant rendering of a photograph of one of Ulysses S. Grant’s councils of war in 1864, the Union command seated on pews carried out into ...”

“... in the UK’s response to the pandemic, the government’s messengers were richly rewarded. Michael Gove’s Cabinet Office gave Topham Guerin a £3 million contract for communications work. The contract – agreed without any competitive tendering – was signed in early May but, unusually, backdated to 17 March, two days before Lee Cain’s Zoom ...”

“... Misanthropocene). It has already ‘picked up a variety of incompatible meanings’, as Jeremy Davies, a professor of English at Leeds, observes in The Birth of the Anthropocene, perhaps the best guide so far to the different senses and timeframes attached to the term. Even so, a common intellectual function seems to unite the various usages and, often, a ...”

“... Lincoln instead. In his diary entry for 12 April 1945, the former Ambassador to the USSR, Joseph Davies, called Roosevelt ‘the greatest and most costly of war casualties’, ‘the martyred leader of the democratic forces of the world, who actually gave his life for the cause’. Having presided over shared sacrifice, Roosevelt and Lincoln embodied ...”

“... by the head of serials, Jonathan Powell, produced by the Birmingham regional drama head, Michael Wearing, and scheduled before Martin had finished the scripts. Third, as a result of its plural structure, the department had gained and kept its reputation as a producer-led, oppositional space, not just for Edge of Darkness, but for Alan Bleasdale’s ...”