“... David Selbourne’s The Principle of Duty is described on the dust-jacket as ‘the most comprehensive theory of civic society written in English since Locke’. ‘In English’ is wise: it excludes Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Hegel, Marx and Weber. The claim remains bizarre: Locke did not produce a theory of civil society, comprehensive or otherwise, but an account of our obligations to government or the state ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Ali’s latest book is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power. David Bromwich Like the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, the rockets from Gaza were a choice of tactics of a spectacular vengefulness. The spectacle was greater than the damage: no Israeli had been killed by a rocket before the IDF launched their ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... family to generate a precise genetic fingerprint of the cell-line. Henrietta Lacks’s husband, David, soon received a call from a geneticist at Hopkins to ask for some blood samples from him and his children. What happened next exemplifies how innocuous medical research can go awry when communication breaks down. The scientist who called ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”