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“... big man. Once one recognises what he is up to, all the paradoxes of his character fall into place. David Willey has written a fascinating book, and has done so from the point of view of an agonised catholic liberal. ‘My faith in God is intact,’ he tells his readers by way of preface, ‘but my allegiance to the Roman Church has been suspended while I ...”

“... From the outset, ambiguity enfolds The Plum in the Golden Vase, David Tod Roy’s translation of the first volume of the monumental 16th-century Chinese novel Chin P’ing Mei. The title, as he explains in his Introduction, is a ‘multiple pun’ composed of one ideogram each from the names of the three principal female protagonists ...”

“... call prominente. Among them were Richard Crossman, A.L. Rowse, Maurice Bowra, Isaiah Berlin, David Astor and the journalist Shiela Grant Duff, who, in 1982, published a book about their relationship, and followed it up with a volume of their correspondence. At opposite ends of the political spectrum he impressed Lord Lothian and won the affection of Sir ...”

“... of fascinating studies, ranging from Babylon to 20th-century Ghana, from China to Madagascar. David Cannadine, in his Introduction, says that the topics covered are mainly pre-modern and therefore outside the scope of most professional historians. In their Acknowledgments, however, the two editors refer to the ‘rites of passage’ of contemporary heads ...”

“... builders of Chernobyl? For the Kariba North Bank power station, however, there is now a memorial-David Morrell’s Indictment. Mr Morrell is the chairman of Mitchell Construction, the original contractors for the KNB project, and his book breaks ground unturned since Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers. In his pages, Mitchell Construction, in legal ...”

“... no talking, coughing, clearing of the throat, or any movement whatsoever of the lips. As David Thomson remarks in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, this was a life ‘so primed for legend, it leaves one feeling that the doleful, suspicious Hughes had some hygienic plan for missing life altogether and going straight into myth’. Hughes was, after ...”

“... for niches and may thus be regarded as a sort of high relief. The earlier free-standing marble David with which the exhibition opens is awkward in articulation and not only (though most obviously) in his impossibly flexed wrist, being also unresolved in expression, and with attempted movement impeded by the narrow block. Towards the end of the exhibition ...”

“... and entertaining contributions. Hugh Trevor-Roper discusses the origins of Scottish kitsch; David Cannadine the (not at all remote) origins of British royal ritual; other contributions concern British rule in India and Welsh cultural identity (treated more respectfully than Trevor-Roper treats poor old Scotland). Eric Hobsbawm both introduces and ...”

“... I wondered if the whole thing was an elaborate joke I’d missed. Meades’s take on an Elizabeth David recipe for sauce au vin du Médoc, which David credited to ‘Madame Bernard, the wife of a wine-grower of Cissac-Médoc’ (Meades wonders whether David ‘emulated [the] deadpan ...”

“... things​ in the relations between authors and publishers never change. Dear Mr Murray, edited by David McClay (John Murray, £16.99), a collection of letters written to six generations of the Murray family, is full of familiar complaints. Jane Austen was ‘very much disappointed … by the delays of the printers’. Maria Rundell, author of A New System of ...”

“... of torture in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). When, at the emotional climax of Disgrace (1999), David Lurie embraces his daughter to comfort her following her gang rape by three men, she is described as ‘stiff as a pole’. Long after she knows his name, Beatriz insists on thinking of Witold as ‘the Pole’: it’s one of the ways she has of keeping him ...”

“... of pace’ might seem to be the problem with this dual strike-force, but happily the author – David Bennie – does not say so. Nick Hornby cannot be blamed for writing of this kind, although Fever Pitch has helped to set the tone. In some ways, Hornby has links with the old school. He knows and cares that there is something ‘moronic’ about his ...”

“... have a relationship extending beyond their weekly group therapy. The youngest of the trio, David Mummery, was born in 1939 – an ominous year for London. He is a writer, obsessed with ‘the London under London’. In 1964, he began researching the city’s ‘lost’ tube lines and stations whose maps exist only in Masonic libraries. Mummery has ...”

“... pathology. It has not always been thought so, but there would be few dissenters nowadays. So when David Pears writes of his book, Motivated Irrationality, that ‘Western philosophy has always puffed the pretensions of reason, which, therefore, can do with a certain amount of deflation’, one has a sense of relief that a philosophically neglected subject is ...”

“... is better informed about the fake soldier, ‘Sergeant Farthing’, claiming that his real name is David Jones and that he is a Welshman loosely attached to the London theatre. As for ‘Mr Bartholomew’, the actor says he believes him to be something of a philosopher, with a dissident and free-thinking bias, a certain mathematical or numerological expertise ...”