“... like John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl and Agents of Innocence by the American writer David Ignatius. In recent years, however, a number of scandals have badly tarnished the reputation of Israel’s security services and stimulated calls for greater public accountability. One of the most damaging blows was struck by Victor Ostrovsky – like the ...”

“... of narrative clarity, which enables Time in a Red Coat to resonate, powerfully, in our minds. David Malouf makes no bones about going to work on his novels as if he were constructing a poem. If I may retranslate a passage from an interview quoted in a French magazine (which shows that his reputation has already spread ...”

“... analysed with care, as is the involvement of many of those named in episodes, often puzzling, in French history. Their study of the Prieuré in the 20th century, reinforced by interviews with some of its agents or representatives, reveals it as a body with connections in influential quarters: the names mentioned include de Gaulle, André Malraux and ...”

“... draped Art Deco dryads, fishbowl lights and heavy velvet curtains. The set was screaming for a David Lynch remake of The Masque of the Red Death. Room Three, Hotel Esperance, Finistère: a beacon of hope at the end of a darkening continent. But something embedded layers deep, mephitic and beyond redemption, was present in this city. All the coded signs ...”

“... day I remember how precarious the talks had been. Reading an article in the Daily Telegraph where David Trimble concludes his argument for a Yes vote by saying ‘we must have confidence in ourselves to face the future, not use the troubles of the past as a comfort blanket,’ I wonder how many Unionists will follow his advice. The vote will be Yes, but he ...”

“... core which has increased in relevance with the passage of time. Such, at any rate, is the theme of David Reisman’s two volumes of intellectual biography and analysis – the most careful and thought-provoking exegesis yet to appear. Crosland was a man of contradictions, as Reisman shows, a hedonist who was also a puritan, and so on. Perhaps the biggest ...”

“... prop. It has passed through the levels of Eng Lit from the coal-owner’s estate in Lawrence to David Storey’s Radcliffe and homoerotic fumblings among the guy ropes. There is the same smack of Mosleyite fellow-travelling that Ishiguro exploits in The Remains of the Day. ‘Stand in the snug every Sunday after service, pull on his thumbs and brag about ...”

“... Foundling Hospital, and forbade his lower-class partner to look after them. In the period of the French Revolution the corset and busk were dispensed with, the breast was (theoretically) more free, and bare-breasted Liberty became the sign of the freedom of the people. The permanence of virtue is, however, guaranteed only by the virtue of the females, and ...”

“... negotiator, said the two sides were ‘still far away’ from an agreement; his UK counterpart, David Frost, admitted there were ‘considerable gaps’. Barnier’s gloomy forecast was that a trade deal was now ‘unlikely’. Barnier hasn’t sounded positive about any of the negotiations he has been involved in since the referendum. The two sides talk ...”

“... them. The 19th-century scholar Fustel de Coulanges had on the basis of current practice among the French nobility supposed that the Greeks worshipped their ancestors, and that from that practice developed the notion of the larger kinship groups called phratriai which survived as political entities in Greek cities. But Humphreys’s data indicate that families ...”

“... exercised her political influence in private. In any case, the conservative reaction against the French Revolution would have made a repetition of 1784 impossible. In consequence, no woman could emulate Georgiana’s exploits for a long time. Indeed, less than thirty years later, many doubted if it was consistent with feminine delicacy for ladies to visit ...”

“... much controversy about ‘musical wallpaper’, though the exchanges quoted here between David Drew (deploring it), Hans Keller (finding paradoxical good in it) and Shawe-Taylor (thinking of benefits to the elderly) centre on the transmission of Haydn’s complete symphonies. Worse was to come, including Mainly for Pleasure. In the years leading up ...”

“... heritage of these arguments in forgotten black authors whose works he resurrects. Beginning with David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) and Hosea Easton’s Treatise on the Intellectual Character and the Political Condition of the Coloured People (1837), he surveys some two dozen texts, erudite and eccentric in turn, compiled by ...”

“... point, Travis, played by Malcolm McDowell, passing the vodka to his friends, Johnny and Wallace (David Wood and Richard Warwick), asks: ‘When do we live? That’s what I want to know.’ Elsewhere in the film, when the three of them are fencing together, playing at fighting, Travis gets cut on the hand, and is fascinated by his own blood. ‘Look,’ he ...”

“... now American troops were arriving in Europe to discover the war was being lost: the British and French armies were in retreat and conventional wisdom said Paris would fall in the summer. The war was expected to drag on at least into 1919, probably into 1920, by which time the weight of American resources might start to tell. Come November the country seemed ...”