“... good Opinion her Passion has made her conceive of him’); Sarah Fielding’s deeply unpleasant David Simple (1744), in which characters with names like Spatter, Lady Know-All and Mr Varnish assail the gormless hero until he drops dead of despair; and Sarah Scott’s thoroughly demoralising Millenium Hall (1762), on the supposed consolations of living in a ...”

“... but esoteric science. The part of Bill Clinton is here played by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist David Baltimore and the junior female colleague is not Monica Lewinsky but a Japanese-Brazilian-American immunologist named Thereza Imanishi-Kari. Their relations are not sexual but wholly collegial. The out-of-control independent counsel is not Kenneth Starr but ...”

“... favourite from the start and duly emerged as the winner. But he did not win by a short head from David Lloyd George. You have to scour the list to find him in 79th place, listed as ‘English, born Manchester (1858-1928)’. The part about Manchester is correct: Lloyd George’s father – who was not the only Welsh schoolteacher to move there – died there ...”

“... involved in Boswell’s undertaking, but what about the degree of invention? It was very much held against Boswell, in the last century but one, that the Johnson he made was very different from the Johnson who lived, and the feeling remains strong among some people that Boswell simply made his hero up. This can’t be true: Edmund Burke remarked that ...”

“... historians, like Strasser, and others by literary critics. In 1996, a graduate student conference held at Harvard bore the uncompromising and prescient title ‘Dirt’, a rubric that encompassed topics from waste management to immigration to pornography. A forthcoming essay collection edited by Ryan Johnson and William Cohen will be entitled Filth. The ...”

“... out of line. Enter Muhammad Ali, who over the next few years was to change the face of boxing. David Remnick’s book in fact concentrates on the two astonishing fights Ali had with Liston (Ali won the title in the first and defended it successfully in the second), and on the relationship between Ali, Liston and Patterson. For Remnick, as for most ...”

“... deal that needed explaining. Some, like the Italian interviewer, have dwelt on the appeal of the David-and-Goliath conflict between the Gauls and the Roman superpower. Or, at least, David and Goliath with a twist: Astérix doesn’t beat brute force by superior cunning and intelligence – he does it thanks to his ...”

“... their belief that their main job is to protect the settlers, not the population under occupation. David Shulman, a distinguished academic, peace activist and a member of Ta’ayush, an organisation of Israeli Palestinians and Jews promoting coexistence, wrote about the hilltop youth in his recent book Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and ...”

“... liked Germany and negotiated the concordat did not mean, however, that he was a crypto-Nazi. As David Kertzer concludes in his new book, ‘Pope Pius XII was certainly not “Hitler’s Pope” … In many ways, the Nazi regime was anathema to the pope and to virtually all those around him in the Vatican. They were alarmed by the Reich’s efforts to weaken ...”

“... to have their dreams interpreted. Messiahs turned up roughly once a century. In 1523, it was David Reubeni, a traveller who claimed to be David, son of Solomon, and had some success touring his act around Italy: he left Rome in a flutter of glittering streamers, embroidered with the words of the Ten Commandments in ...”

“... had made the scurrilous claim that ‘negroes’ could be proclaimed ‘subjects of the realm, and held entitled to all the rights, liberties, and privileges of natural, or free-born subjects’. The nation was supported by its trade, he argued, and British commerce and opinion ‘esteemed Negroe labourers merely a commodity, or chose in merchandise ...”

“... for tourist buses. Tourism was a necessary theology, and all along the river-road breakaway sects held their own dances and had their own tin-roofed churches and stalls of trinkets. This was a highly competitive market economy, without the traditional raids and kidnappings. I remembered Herzog’s creed, as reported by Bruce Chatwin: ‘Walking is a ...”

“... sent to Oxford to acquire British accents and a pseudo-patrician indifference to book-keeping, David Niven Oriental-style. In Mori’s time a middle-rank Foreign Ministry official was caught using secret funds to keep a string of racehorses, yachts and a mistress in a smart apartment – outraging Japanese voters worried about their jobs. Scandal followed ...”

“... been open opposition to the last ceasefire. An Islamist Pakistani captain refused to vacate Indian-held territory. A colonel despatched by the Pakistani High Command to order an immediate withdrawal was shot dead as a traitor to Islam. Already a partial wreck, Pakistan could be destroyed by a civil war. The terrorists who carried out the killings in the US ...”

“... in a delicate copperplate hand, ‘The daughter of Admiral Walker’, followed by a signature: ‘David Wilkie f-t 1840’. Near her there used to hang another portrait, of a fantastical fellow in a high tarbush with a long, dangling plume, his chest puffed out in his dress uniform, with prominent epaulettes, medals at his throat and a long scimitar cradled ...”