“... thoughts occur like ‘I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or ‘There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’ So I was happy to read in Gavin Lambert’s Mainly about Lindsay Anderson* that Lindsay harboured similar thoughts about such self-imposed menialities. On the eve of filming O Lucky Man Lindsay has his ailing ...”

“... a term regularly applied to extraordinary acts of bravery when we abhor their ends and means. The silliest description of the onslaught on the World Trade Center was the often repeated slogan that it was a ‘cowardly’ attack. Mary Beard Cambridge It has been hard in the past twenty years for Americans to think about the United States and the ...”

“... in Russia, Greece, Poland and Hungary, as well as Taiwan and Iran. The other prominent declinist, David Thomson, wasn’t even convinced of that. The only director in Sontag’s contemporary pantheon who featured in the edition of Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film that I owned was the oldest, Theo Angelopoulos, and in his entry Thomson lamented that ...”

“... A layman might be forgiven for assuming that those two at least were on the same side. But when David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, two young American scholars, cited Stedman Jones and Joyce as exemplars of social history’s ‘linguistic turn’ in an essay published in Social History in 1992, a tempest ensued. Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, two of Stedman ...”

“... respect is the intricate and soundly-researched exploration of Irish cultural ‘otherness’ by David Cairns and Shaun Richards in Writing Ireland, although it is clogged in parts by awkward efforts to align its arguments with those of the European masters: Foucault, Lacan, Gramsci and Althusser are all invoked at length in the opening pages, and are ...”

“... and translations of the Book of Psalms, the original book of Dave – supposedly written by King David, the Neim Z’mirot Yisrael (‘the sweet singer of Israel’) – ‘substantially shaped the culture of 16th and 17th-century England, resulting in creative forms as diverse as singing psalters, metrical psalm paraphrases, sophisticated poetic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... straightforward. I was born in Sunderland; my family moved to Dewsbury six months later, but that means nothing in the eyes of true tykes or – until they relaxed their Yorkshire-only selection policy in 1992 – the Yorkshire County Cricket Club. My father was a vicar and diocesan director of education; my mother the head of a church primary school. This ...”

“... the reasons, anthropology became progressively less iconographic after the 1920s. Even as a means of documentation, film came to be seen as being of limited value in an academic discipline which aspired to become an objective science on a par with physics and biology. The use of the kinematograph by the pioneers had certainly been very naive. Some of ...”

“... documents. The consensus was that her conduct had been careless and wrong, but that it by no means warranted prosecution for giving aid and comfort to enemies of the United States. A faction in the New York field office of the bureau disagreed; and, using their connections with the ex-mayor of New York Rudolph Giuliani, they orchestrated a series of ...”

“... would the people then have, except to agree new taxes in order to provide the nation with the means to fight? A king with no credit will always require more money, but a king with no credit need have no compunction about how he gets it. A royal bankruptcy, Sieyès declared, would be ‘the ruin of all hope’. But it would not be the ruin of the ...”

“... for episode one, to five million for episodes two and three, to 3.8 million for episode four. This means that 3.2 million people never discovered that ‘Dennis Potter’ was the author of it all, but perhaps they are the 3.2 million who felt it was sufficient to know that Dennis Potter without the quotation marks wrote the piece and made a quality decision to ...”

“... always identified as the Assunta by Italians, never the Assunzione. It​ is understandable that David Ekserdjian consistently adopts the modern museum-type categorisation of subjects. His massive and very impressive book is remarkable for the range of altarpieces he considers, covering the whole of Italy from the early 13th century to 1600, many of them ...”

“... more dramatic than in Miami, a great resort and retirement capital for the Northeast, now – as David Rieff puts it in Going to Miami – a mirror city to Havana. There have been no less than five recent books on Miami, of which those by Rieff and Joan Didion,* quite different in tone and treatment, are the most prominent. Miami has also become crucial to ...”