“... The nostalgia of Christine Brooke-Rose is, surprisingly, for a golden age of character in fiction; David Caute harks back to the Sixties and the heyday of radical hopes; John Fuller conjures a world in which stories can still enchant. But these novelists are all, in their respective ways, nervous about the power of fiction to enthrall, and they live on the ...”

“... Trump replied. “It’s all bullshit.”’ Woodward is repeating himself here, which means he may have got his notes muddled up. What’s more likely is that everyone was just saying the same thing over and over again. Trump wanted to bring the money home, especially from South Korea. In desperation, Cohn asked him emolliently: ‘So, Mr President, what ...”

“... what with one thing and another I’ve sometimes felt the same way, on behalf of Mark Frost and David Lynch, about the news environment that accompanied the broadcast of Twin Peaks: The Return. I say ‘on behalf of’ because I imagine that Lynch couldn’t care less. ‘It’s good to kind of go along with your life,’ he told Entertainment Weekly in ...”

“... in 1793, he declared that if what he had advocated was treasonable, then Plato, Harrington and David Hume were equally guilty. To the present-day student of Hume, Muir’s inclusion of him in his catalogue of reformers must appear even odder than his appeal to Plato: for Hume is usually and rightly portrayed as a consistent defender of the 18th-century ...”

“... passing judgment on his characters with such solemn self-assurance, as from a Jacobean pulpit. It may be that the vengeful, conceited, ludicrous monologues of the appalling Croucher represent a form of self-parody. In our next three novels, all candidates for the bestseller list, the wacky, wonderful world of Washington DC and its heroic Press Corps is laid ...”

“... and men five. The six-year gap that had opened up by 1951 was back to four. Since 2011, under David Cameron and Theresa May, life expectancy has flatlined. The latest figures, published by the Office for National Statistics in September, are for the period 2014-16. Women can now expect to live for 83.06 years and men ...”

“... Like most biographies nowadays, David Nokes’s John Gay is very long, but unlike some of the others it is not much longer than it needed to be. Gay devoted so much of his attention to people grander than himself that his life story can’t be told without allusion to those of more complicated and ambitious figures like Pope, Swift and Addison ...”

“... Belushi, and, it should be added, few have been so telling or so readable as Indecent Exposure, David McClintick’s relentlessly documented account of the scandalous behaviour of the unsinkable executive David Begelman. Film and television documentarists have also been vigorously elbowing their way forward. A team from ...”

“... more extreme. The charitable impulses of Dorchester’s citizens were, at the same time, stirred. David Underdown has discovered in Dorchester an outpouring of philanthropy on an extraordinary scale, unrivalled in England. Here was a town of only 2500 inhabitants which gave, in the fight for Christ against Antichrist, £150 for the defence of their ...”

“... rediscovery of his unfinished epic The Civil War, edited by Allan Pritchard in 1973. What pleases David Trotter is the conception of Cowley as a poet of cultural crisis, of the ‘intellectual revolution’ of the 17th century. Three leading ideas help him to take this view. The first is Eliot’s hypothesis of a 17th-century dissociation of sensibility, here ...”

“... dangerous forces of working-class unrest and political protest were deeply unsettling. Today we may relate that unrest to the increased share of the new prosperity of a modernising and developing society which had been mopped up by the better-off, and may relate this prosperity to the new, British dimension. Given the ...”

“... taken a couple of sessions for Batoni to get the sitter’s face onto canvas – the 12 he gave David Garrick were unusual. He made no preliminary drawings; when it came to finishing the figure a stand-in could take up the chosen position, usually a variation on a settled range of elegantly relaxed poses. Batoni, who was not cheap, was inclined to work ...”

“... the way developments in algorithmic warfare have transformed Israeli military operations.I met David (names have been changed throughout) in June at a café in West Jerusalem. He had volunteered for reserve duty in the Israeli intelligence corps a few days after the 7 October attacks. Many Israelis are one degree of separation from someone ...”

“... signalled by a chunky scarlet arrow, and accompanied by a caption such as ‘Cutting the grass at David Davis’s home is very expensive.’ The newly demotic Telegraph has exposed a lot of predictable wangles and fiddles, along with a very few cases of prima facie fraud, which may or ...”

“... later to serve as one of London’s first cinemas). Other French paintings, including a version of David’s Coronation of Napoleon, with its dazzling profusion of documentary details, were shown separately in London in the same period. By the mid-century touring exhibitions were taking some popular English pictures such as John Martin’s Great Day of his ...”