“... could invite to his study for extra-curricular supervision. After reading this book, I telephoned David Blackie, who now runs a computer language course in Bedfordshire, and who was unlucky enough to be patronised by Trench at Bradfield in the early Sixties. Blackie is quoted by Peel as criticising Trench’s ‘penchant for unrestricted and unsupervised ...”

“... it begin and where did it end?’ wrote her close friend Raymond Marriott. In such circumstances David Callard should be congratulated for completing the project al all. It is not a very satisfactory biography but she was not a very satisfactory subject. Callard’s previous book, Pretty Good for a Woman: The Enigma of Evelyn Scott, charted the life of a ...”

“... Dalí’s skulking grasshoppers and swarming ants, Frida Kahlo’s grizzled caterpillars, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and David Cronenberg’s The Fly.Goulson finds our aversion to insects mysterious. He has a point: outside malarial zones, the danger they pose to human health is limited. People living in the Global ...”

“... the mendacity or hypocrisy of a public man who says one thing and privately does another. In 2007, David Runciman devoted his Carlyle Lectures at Oxford to the subject of hypocrisy – not hypocrisy in general, but hypocrisy in politics. It is a wonderful topic. Everyone knows that politics is partly a matter of ritual and ceremony, deception and ...”

“... grandfather’s regiment) and the SAS, after a meeting at White’s with its legendary founder, David Stirling, ‘a man of beautifully dangerous ideas’ who became a kind of godfather to him. Stirling tried to recruit Mann for a mercenary operation in the Seychelles, but the army wouldn’t let him go. When he did leave the army, a rich friend wangled him ...”

“... famous doesn’t just mean ‘enduring the bizarre projections of others’, Cogan explains, it means constantly being besieged by their ‘shivering, shaking bodies hanging around waiting to put themselves next to mine out in the dark every night’, being ‘terrorised by the instant access that being well known seemed to give me to the ...”

“... got married. They met at the soup kitchen. His name is Günther Cohn. He’s a Polish Jew. That means that Susanne goes from the German waiting list to the Polish waiting list, and the latter is interminably long.’ News of Susanne’s deportation was sent by a friend who followed the car that took her to the train station. Years later, Hannah went to an ...”

“... it inspired a rich store of legends about his astonishing feats of magic. As the medievalist David Collins asked, is it Magnus or Magus, Albert the Great or Albert the Magician? Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell, who have long toiled on the Albertian corpus, provide a lively, accessible introduction to his life and thought. Albert joined the Dominican ...”

“... What is the point of an agreement, we wondered, that joins those who see a Bill of Rights as a means of strengthening the connection with the Convention, with others for whom a Bill of Rights is at bottom a means of ditching the Convention and severing more links with Europe (with the added benefit, from our ...”

“... his point is simply that if we fix the price distortions caused by externalities, we can be as David to Goliath without really changing anything. Probably.Credit where it’s due: Nordhaus was one of the first among his peers to name the climate colossus. It has taken more than forty years for the rest of the business community, and the elite economists ...”

“... can be exaggerated, faked or feigned,’ the psychologists Peter Halligan, Christopher Bass and David Oakley wrote in their introduction to a collection of essays from 2003 titled Malingering and Illness Deception. Medical professionals, researchers and even courts, they went on, were often reluctant ‘to entertain the label or to stigmatise individuals as ...”

“... feathers. ‘Distinction in garments’ was, they argued, invidious. Much later, Jacques-Louis David, the artist most identified with the revolution, was asked to come up with an alternative for parliamentarians, a costume that would evoke the dignity of the Greek and Roman republics. The result was a complicated outfit, involving tights, tunics and ...”

“... contain a great deal of unpleasant and difficult poetry – for example, this passage from David Melnick’s Pcoet which Silliman prints: seta colecc puilse, i canoe it spear heieo as Rea, cinct pp pools we sly drosp Geianto     (o sordea, o weedsea!) The Canadian writer Steve McCaffrey once wrote of Pcoet that its text ‘seems less like writing ...”

“... In 1987, David Cannadine concluded an essay on what he saw as the dark and doubtful state of British history with a call to ‘fashion a new version of the national past which can regain its place in our general national culture, and become once again an object of international interest’. A job application posted through the unusual medium of a scholarly journal? I doubt it, but it may be that this essay found its way onto a desk at Penguin Books, leading to Cannadine’s appointment, in 1988, as general editor of the new Penguin History of Britain ...”

“... children out to nurse for two years (not an example found in Yalom). We have, as Yalom shows, few means of understanding what the wet-nurses thought, or how they and their own babies were treated. We do know that on the slave-owners’ plantations, female slaves were made to nurse white babies. Sojourner Truth reminded her audience of this uncomfortable fact ...”