“... a rough sleeper and at worst, with anything involving cotton prints or ankle socks, it’s Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. Second on the list of things Miller has given up in old age is sex. It is in fact, she says, ‘the main thing’ that she doesn’t want any more, but it takes her some time to get round to spelling this out. It has come ...”

“... Britain’; there had been ‘nothing like it since Inigo Jones’. The great American modernist Philip Johnson praised its ‘distinction’ in the Architectural Review. Local people disliked it, possibly because, as the Smithsons thought, they were unsophisticated but without doubt because the combination of glass façades and inadequate underfloor heating ...”

“... range of other artists he appeals. Surely the only thing in common between Samuel Beckett, Miles Davis, Martin Scorsese, Philip Larkin, Frank O’Hara, Bob Marley, would be their shared interest in his music. His songs have been more widely covered by other musicians, ranging from Frank Sinatra to Jimi Hendrix, from Olivia ...”

“... by all means in this country,’ Alderman Roberts of Grantham was moved to remark in 1946. As John Davis concluded in the Cambridge Urban History of Britain (2000), the second half of the 20th century saw local authorities reduced to ‘agents of the central welfare state, their incapacity off-set by central subsidies which covered over 60 per cent of local ...”

“... study depends on discovering meaning without inventing it. When, however, Professor Natalie Davis wrote about ‘fiction in the archives’ she made an important and valid point, although not all her fellow historians have chosen to grasp it. When Elton wrote that the Tudor martyrologist John Foxe did not invent a myth but recorded a truth about things ...”

“... accounts of the role of gift-giving within early modern culture, such as those by Natalie Zemon Davis and by the father of gift theory, Marcel Mauss. Scott-Warren looks in detail at the settings within which Harington wrote, dedicated and donated his books, and finds each act of giving to be a precisely motivated cultural performance, which urges a point of ...”

“... service to establish Black units, while continuing the policy of segregation. Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, the highest ranking Black man in the army, was soon promoted to brigadier general (he remained the only African American general for the rest of the war). These changes led to a rise in Black enlistment. But Black draftees were often sent to training camps ...”

“... Bourgeois or Richard Tuttle or Jean-Michel Basquiat. (See recent coup to the right: an accidental Philip Guston. Guston’s 1968 painting Boot is above, and below a CE artist’s picture, now in my collection, of an eight-fingered glove.) At such moments, you not only feel that you have got something extraordinary for a pleasingly modest sum, but also that ...”

“... grumps – McCarthy to Edmund Wilson, who locked her in a room to force her to write, Sontag to Philip Rieff, the sociologist she met as a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as Partisan Review’s theatre reviewer. Lines of succession make for neat ...”

“... in the 17th and 18th centuries, whose decline is succinctly analysed in a monograph by J.C. Davis published in 1962, which, although its conclusions have been qualified by the more exhaustive researches of Dr Jean Georgelin, still furnishes an instructive example for my purpose here. The decline not only in numbers and wealth but in both the capacity ...”

“... for American writers who prefer the national mannerism of the barbaric yawp. Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Rush are exact contemporaries, born in 1933. McCarthy excels at antique dialogue and rapturous word-pictures of frontier landscapes; likes to portray violence; won’t represent thought; can’t do women; and has denounced Henry James and the ...”

“... attack was the dominant mode of engagement. Parodying the accumulating barrage, Lennard J. Davis wrote that Watt ‘made some really big mistakes’: He thought there was ‘a’ novel; he thought it had a beginning; he assumed it was a narrative fiction that displaced previous narrative fictions and had a ‘rise’ located in metropole ...”

“... blankets and sheets that the bed turned psychedelic.’Meanwhile, the undertaker Royal Davis encourages his reluctant school-age son to hand out business cards at scenes of trauma. Royal is a ‘freelance mortician’, two words that by rights should have nothing to do with each other. What this means in practice is that his business is not doing ...”

“... in 1962, filmed with Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in 1966), referring to a line spoken by Bette Davis in King Vidor’s 1949 film Beyond the Forest, and one man’s sexual desire for another? How is it that an Australian readership in 2000 can be expected to pick up these distant references without their being explained? How are such links forged? The ...”

“... York, where he produced Talking Heads, curated the ‘No Wave’ compilation No New York, and took Philip Glass to see the B-52s. I was briefly in New York in the summer of 1981 and read a long interview with him in a paper called the East Village Eye. This was my first sighting of a kind of hagiographical fanboy profile Eno would increasingly attract; it ...”