“... called ‘the long ball game’, also known as ‘up and under’, ‘biff-bang football’ and ‘FA Coaching Manual Route One’. A team playing to this pattern eschews the normal tactic of gradually building up a move through the midfield in favour of hoofing the ball upfield as fast as possible towards the strikers. The idea is to give defenders a constant ...”

“... but not without hope. John Fuller’s The Burning Boys is interested in other kinds of separation. David’s mother is killed in the Blitz, and he goes to live with his down-to-earth grandmother and nubile young aunt. His life goes underground. David covertly observes the strange adult goings-on around him, approaching ...”

“... accepted Boeing’s tender for a massive new cargo aircraft for the United States Air Force, David Lodge would not have been able to write Paradise News. Instead, however, Lockheed got the contract, and Boeing were left with a redundant set of blueprints for the biggest furniture van never built. To save all that development money going to waste, they ...”

“... the face of the Madonna looking very like the pictures Raphael or Perugino painted of her. David Blackhourn has produced an exhaustive study of the apparitions of the Madonna in July 1876 in Marpingen, and the turbulent aftermath which embroiled the Army, the Berlin secret police, and the Prussian Parliament. An obscure village of around 1600 ...”

“... damning everything to do with Rastignac. He was thinking of Emile Faguet, but we might think of F.R. Leavis performing the same sort of operation on Daniel Deronda. ‘A book is still for me a living whole,’ Proust said, ‘with which I strike up an acquaintance from the very first line, that I listen to with deference, that I allow to be in the right all ...”

“... unless you accept that there is no substitute for, no viable alternative to, clarity. According to David Matthews, Tippett himself has come close to this view – ever since the early Sixties, when he ‘joined Britten in a liking for clear, uncluttered textures’. Did he? And has he thus continued? On and off. His most recent, Fourth Quartet (1977-8) is a ...”

“... London Evening Standard had turned down the editorship of the Times in favour of succeeding Sir David English at the Daily Mail. As a boy, wrote Sir Perry, he had wanted to be editor of the Times more than anything in the world. So when Mr Paul Dacre picked Rothermere’s Daily Mail in preference to Rupert Murdoch’s Times, Worsthorne’s first reaction ...”

“... David Lynch’s​ films seemed to come out of nowhere. That’s what he said, anyway. Ideas were ‘little gifts … They just come into your head and it’s like Christmas morning.’ One moment he would be thinking about Bobby Vinton’s 1963 cover of ‘Blue Velvet’; the next thing he knew, a severed ear was lying in a field ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... be made use of in ways that are contextually effective, and surprisingly original. That is what David Piper contrived to do in a brilliant one-off war novel, Trial by Battle. It describes the experiences of a young officer, the reverse of professional, during the 1941 Malayan campaign between the British-Indian Army and the Japanese: the campaign which led ...”

“... Late one evening, leaving a dinner party at the American Embassy, I ran into David Carritt, who told me he had come across a circular bronze relief of the Virgin and Child in use as an ashtray.’ The narrator is Sir John Pope-Hennessy and his nocturnal encounter was with one of the most hawk-eyed art-dealers in Europe ...”

“... what with one thing and another I’ve sometimes felt the same way, on behalf of Mark Frost and David Lynch, about the news environment that accompanied the broadcast of Twin Peaks: The Return. I say ‘on behalf of’ because I imagine that Lynch couldn’t care less. ‘It’s good to kind of go along with your life,’ he told Entertainment Weekly in May ...”

“... of neglect: John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding and David Schubert. ‘I myself value Schubert more than Pound or Eliot,’ Ashbery says, and one can imagine some members of his audience gasping. In the introduction to his 1966 anthology, 19th-Century British Minor Poets, Auden provides four tests for being a ...”

“... receiving royal assent. Blair was said to have directly intervened to delay its implementation. David Cameron later described FOI as a ‘buggeration factor’ that ‘furs up’ the arteries of government.It’s hardly surprising that FOI is unpopular in Downing Street. The MPs’ expenses scandal emerged from documents prepared in response to an ...”

“... 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 ...”