“... The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing David Copperfield’s opening speculation whether he would turn out the hero of his own life story. The object of this is to characterise the young Olivier as a Dickens child, a version of David, and his father, the widowed ...”

“... opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’, has ...”

“... as the trial approached, his attitude changed perceptibly. Writing to his friend the journalist David Ayerst, Tippett declared himself ‘very much at peace and ready to go’.On 21 August 1943, at 7.30 a.m. precisely, after serving two months of his three-month sentence, Tippett was released from Wormwood Scrubs. He was ...”

“... mentioned by Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of ...”

“... no sustained narratives of disease. Autobiographies in the shadow of death were rare and brief. In David Hume’s six-page-long account of his life there are four sentences about his impending end: ‘I was struck with a disorder in my bowels which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a ...”

“... appeared in 2013. The last chapter of the book, based on nine years of research by its authors, David Shields and Shane Salerno, claimed that at least five books were finished when Salinger died: a collection of Glass stories, a book about the Indian philosophical-religious tradition of Vedanta, a novel about Salinger’s strange marriage to a German woman ...”

“... The British reaction had been tepid at first, and the country seemed to be basking in the long peace of which Robert Walpole boasted to the queen in 1734: ‘Madam, there are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe, and not one Englishman.’ Yet the insult somehow festered in the public memory and offered an opportunity for Walpole’s enemies to ...”

“... reinforced by a misunderstanding of the comments of a French critic on an episode in Sarah’s David Simple; and on the freewheeling appeals to unnamed psychologists, already noticed. The first item is the only one involving the barest appearance of a biographical fact. After their mother died, Henry and the other children lived in the care of their ...”

“... associated. The purge of 1519, for instance, which has so engrossed Gwyn’s bête noire David Starkey, was ‘a storm in a tea-cup’. The truth, pronounces Gwyn, is that the political world of Wolsey’s ascendancy was ‘not an environment where faction flourished’. It was nevertheless an environment where the Duke of Buckingham got his head ...”

“... be attached to his intrepid voyage? Of the natives he first observed in ‘Hispaniola’, as David Brading’s book records, Colombo wrote: ‘They do not have arms and are all naked and with no ability for war and are very cowardly, so that a thousand could not resist three [Castilians] and thus they are fit to be commanded and made to work and to sow ...”

“... Israeli officials, for a man detained as a suspect in the killings of two Palestinians. The man, David Axelrod, is not related to Leon Trotsky. A man with the same name, who is a descendant of Trotsky, was questioned briefly by the police in a case of mistaken identity. The arcane character of this item, which was at the top of that day’s menu, might make ...”

“... get carried away beyond the merits of an originally sound case. Why, he goes on, do writers like David Pryce-Jones want the Parisians to have behaved like the people of Warsaw? It is certainly true that, as a result of their rising, the inhabitants of Warsaw managed to get their city largely razed to the ground. If Hitler had had his way, Paris would have ...”

“... the mind. The Stoic scorns those external circumstances of prosperity and affliction, war and peace, health and sickness, praise and blame, which, falling within the province of fortune, are beyond the control of virtue, and are therefore inherently neither good nor evil. In the words of Guillaume du Vair, who after Lipsius was the most influential ...”

“... the floorboards she discovers her husband in the arms of another woman, who, much too late for the peace of all concerned, is revealed to be his sister. When Sally dreams that she has found the corpse of her first love, Peter Gow, on the battlefield, it suddenly starts up at her. She dreams that she too has been killed, and, waking, finds Gow ...”

“... a republic; the British Empire had been formally wound up in Hong Kong; and in Northern Ireland a peace process was actively resumed. This, if it gets anywhere at all by 1998, is bound to imply a more ‘neutral’ form of government in which the Crown is less prominent. Then came the accident in the Pont de I’Alma underpass. The monarchy had already been ...”