“... of sex (see innumerable campus novels and many of the works of the postwar American writers whom David Foster Wallace derided as ‘the Great Male Narcissists’). On the page, though, the resulting hybrid is anything but ungainly, and in any case the narrator is out ahead of both types of reader, pointing to Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, a touchstone both for ...”

“... image is trapped inside the prism. No one around you can see it – it’s almost a hallucination. David Hockney, who took up drawing with a modern camera lucida in 1999, described it in Secret Knowledge (2001) as projecting not ‘a real image of the subject, but an illusion of one in the eye’:At first I found the camera lucida very difficult to use ...”

“... and populares, has not used his life of Pompey to carry the process further. No one could accuse David Stockton’s The Gracchi of a similar failure to discuss evidence and problems. It begins by setting out the basic workings of the Republican constitution, and continues with a (rather brief) examination of the literary sources. There follows a sober survey ...”

“... In fact, I believe that few of Barbara’s colleagues, in any wing of the party, would have held that view. She shows herself to be very jealous of Shirley Williams, and in particular of Shirley’s success with the media, by whom she always felt herself battered. One can understand her resentment of the fact that of the two nicest people in ...”

“... In Vienna’s small world I had no idea that scientists of the calibre of J.D. Bernal, W.L. Bragg, David Keilin and Dorothy Hodgkin existed: how then could I have even tried to emulate them? It was Cambridge that made me, not Vienna. The longest chapter in Medawar’s book concerns scientific life and manners. I like his admonition not to regard manual work as ...”

“... the Russian Revolutions of 1917. The Bolsheviks, unlikely winners of power that looked precarious, held the centre of the country, while White armies supported by the Allies dominated Russia’s peripheries. Sixteen countries were involved in the intervention to some degree, not counting British and French colonial troops (a term which Reid uses to cover ...”

“... 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 ...”