“... May ... Thy name they bury, having buried thee; Drones eat thy honey – thou wert the true bee. Peace keep thy soul! Middleton does not say who ‘they’ were, but his readers knew well enough who had ‘cut off’ Nashe’s livelihood. And the other poets of this fable do not fare much better. The Nightingale is, of course, raped Philomel, the archetypal ...”

“... writers who have perpetrated the most evil among men.’ If Locke has a competitor in this, it is David Hume, ‘the most culpable of these fatal writers who will not cease to damn the [18th] century in the eyes of posterity, the one who has used the most talent with the most composure to produce the most evil.’ Europe is in chaos because intellectuals like ...”

“... but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by ...”

“... all. How far their doctrines are really relevant to Paine is queried in another recent book, by David Wilson, and it may be safer to look to the general tradition of English radicalism and dissent stemming from the 17th century: one writer drawn on by Paine is Milton. Paine had scientific interests, and took great pride in his design for an iron bridge: he ...”

“... adieus his lips are chapped) – given all these givens, one would have thought he had made his peace with his words and famous name leaving a faint trace. Compared to such beating pulsars as Mailer or Bellow, he seemed resigned to the indifferent clockwork of the cosmos (perhaps the best anecdote in Kaplan’s book is when Bellow asks if he can introduce ...”

“... on plates at the door? The señor and señora are preparing them to starve.’ The title story in David Leavitt’s Family Dancing begins with a graduation party, flower arrangement and girls in starched tunics, handing trays around. But like the other stories, ‘Family Dancing’ soon scratches its polished surfaces and considers the rough edges of Middle ...”

“... of a bedside table defaced by cigarette burns. This fantasy has some bearing on the task facing David Sylvester in writing this marvellous book. He has discovered a room behind the wardrobe. In 1912, Magritte, 13 at the time, lost his mother who, after several unsuccessful attempts at suicide, managed to drown herself. According to Magritte’s ...”

“... and the invention of painting in antiquity (a motif Goya may have derived from the Scottish artist David Allan, one of whose paintings was on board the frigate The Westmoreland when it was captured by French warships in 1779, its contents dispersed in Spain).In 1786, Carlos III appointed Goya a court painter. The opportunities at court, however, were limited ...”

“... served to legitimise or disguise our subjugation. The idea that women are inherently more peace-loving or empathetic isn’t substantially different from familiar sexist stereotypes. The suggestion that women’s experience, rather than their nature, provides them with superior insight into – and sympathy with – the anti-patriarchal project makes ...”

“... to write a song with Jackson’s brother Jermaine, ‘a passion-filled song that calls for world peace and global solidarity in the face of wars and disasters’. According to local correspondents, the record already has a title, ‘He Who Makes the Sky Grey’, but no release date is in sight. The king’s son has high hopes for the recording. He recently ...”

“... of an intelligence clearly capable of passing the 16th-century equivalent of the eleven plus; and David Starkey’s fluent and vivid account of her early life and apprenticeship. Starkey confesses to having half fallen in love with the young Elizabeth, but to be merely interested in the later Gloriana, ‘her face caked in carmine and white lead ... an ...”

“... here rather than an error. Still, I don’t think we need to see Joyce as being disingenuous – David Greetham wonders about this in an essay in a booklet accompanying the new edition of Finnegans Wake – since we know what he could do with bits and scraps. In his letter he continues: ‘But then I never read Rabelais either though nobody will believe ...”

“... and worldly phenomena in ways that can’t easily be unscrambled. (In this respect he resembles David Lynch, with whom he sometimes seems to have a doppelgänger-like relationship; six years before Twin Peaks he published a story beginning: ‘A dwarf came into my dream and asked me to dance.’) Toru Okada’s search for his cat, for example, becomes a ...”

“... between Collier and her friend Sarah Fielding, author of the sentimental novel The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and contributor to her brother Henry’s Joseph Andrews (1742). They had worked together before – Collier wrote a preface for the 1753 sequel to David Simple, and in 1749 they both produced critical ...”

“... various modern scholars and writers, makes an impressive list. The best place to start – as David Stuttard does in his new biography – is family background. For all its democratic politics, Athenian society was intensely class-conscious. Although Alcibiades was a product of that complex network of upper-crust intermarried families which produced most ...”