“... low-profile, best-selling author of some of the most remarkable historical fiction of the century. David Sweetman met Mary Renault in 1981, when he interviewed her for the BBC; he had been under the spell of her books since he read them as ‘an awkward, insecure teenager’. He brings to the art of biography a well-intentioned gentleness that is rare; but it ...”

“... Cup Final ...’ ‘When we had Huw Wheldon at the BBC ...’ ‘When we were first married ...’ David Hare calls the curators of these arcadias the ‘whenwes’. They guard their territory with a dogged devotion. Although the theatre is a medium that exists entirely in the present tense, it is not immune to the arcadian virus: ‘the National Theatre at ...”

“... even further away? Eight years later, in the Deheisha refugee camp on the occupied West Bank, David Grossman experienced a faintly similar phenomenon. He was listening to an old Palestinian woman remembering her past, in the village of Ain Azrab, baking bread over a straw fire, the woman all the time unconsciously working her fingers through the motion of ...”

“... are commonly brought up to show that the modernist impetus survived in the generation after Pound: David Jones, Anglo-Welshman; Basil Bunting, Northumbrian Englishman; and Hugh MacDiarmid, Lowland Scot. The claim for Jones seems the weakest: it is advanced by Jones’s admirers, not by the poet himself, who took no interest in the question, having other fish ...”

“... is that first step to be achieved? Among Palestinians there is unanimous condemnation of the Camp David accords and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty that stems from them. They are seen as an attempt by Egypt, Israel and the United States, acting in concert, to trim down the question of Palestine and perhaps even to make it disappear altogether. In the ...”

“... His subsequent career is a seemingly irreversible decline into neglect and oblivion: according to David Wyatt he no longer makes even a token appearance in standard anthologies of American literature. Mark Twain’s reputation, of course, has rarely been higher. Back in 1866, however, Twain declared: ‘Though I am generally placed at the head of my breed of ...”

“... How long​ do we have left, and how bad will it get? David Wallace-Wells opens his book with a short, sharp reality check: ‘It’s worse, much worse, than you think.’ All the news is bad. Marshalling research from across the sprawling field of climate studies, Wallace-Wells paints a picture of disastrous change on an almost incomprehensible scale ...”

“... it looks as if the electorate has abandoned them too – hence his dumping of the Tories in 1997. David McKnight sees all this differently. Murdoch knew that he could have no influence in China. There was no point in alienating its government and damaging his profits, so he ditched the promotion of democracy and with it the BBC and Patten. In 1997, Murdoch ...”

“... book features a cartoon from the Independent: an apocalyptic lightning flash strikes and anoints David Cameron, while Brown and Alistair Darling flee London as Parliament quakes against the background of a setting sun. Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party is less dramatic: we see Brown, Mandelson and Blair in a morning-after sprawl; Brown’s big toe ...”

“... leader. Would he – could he? – perform the countless vital tasks that come naturally to David Cameron or Tony Blair: everything from how to comport yourself at the despatch box to the best way to climb out of a chauffeur-driven car, from how to use an autocue to knowing which pop band to choose on Desert Island Discs. If you don’t know which tie ...”

“... living room. It’s now in the laundry room of the house that I’ve long shared with my husband, David Coster. (He’s a farm boy turned general surgeon – very handsome, with blond hair and blue eyes – whom I met just a few months after that sabbatical, and he’s also only a few months younger than I am.) And I may well – as either a joke or an only ...”

“... Belushi, and, it should be added, few have been so telling or so readable as Indecent Exposure, David McClintick’s relentlessly documented account of the scandalous behaviour of the unsinkable executive David Begelman. Film and television documentarists have also been vigorously elbowing their way forward. A team from ...”

“... David Benedictus is the Editor of Readings for BBC Radio’s Book at Bedtime. His Sunny Intervals and Showers is ill-suited for late-night reading, since it is not good to have the mind quickened from torpor by such speculations as ‘What happened to all the water in Noah’s Flood?’ or ‘Can the beatings of a butterfly’s wings start a typhoon?’ or, on a more practical level, ‘Could I have dealt with a mischievous fireball in the kitchen as summarily as that (unnamed) Smethwick housewife who “courageously sent it packing, and suffered nothing more serious than a burnt frock”?’ Still less does it assist slumber to reflect on the implications of that 1990 Sun headline (surely the longest Sun headline ever written) which said: ‘Britain has gone sex-crazy as red-hot lovers rush to do it in the great outdoors, say experts ...”

“... David Lockwood is the sociologist’s sociologist in the same way that Ken Rosewall used to be the tennis player’s tennis player: he’s the one the other pros turn out to watch. But you need to know the fixture list. To switch to an older metaphor, he is apt not only to hide his light under a bushel but to hide the bushel as well ...”

“... David Mitchell​ is a career-long genre-bender. Only with his fourth book, Black Swan Green (2006), did he raid his own store of experience to write a first-novelish novel, a charming if low-key coming-of-age story, set in Worcestershire in 1982, full of references to Findus Crispy Pancakes, the Falklands War and playground slang ...”