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“... you, sir.’ Gertrude Stein’s first words were ‘In that case, what’s the question?’ Henry David Thoreau’s first words were ‘Moose ... Indian ...’ Sir Thomas Urquhart’s first word was something like ‘Habonghadingdonghagong.’ Leonardo da Vinci’s first words were ‘God and man have I offended.’ William Ill’s first words were ‘Can ...”

“... Libération lay beneath a bridge during a firefight near Grozny while shells landed all about him. David Hearst of the Guardian and David Chater of Sky News, who had gone up to the village of Pervomaisk near Grozny to observe the Russian advance, were nearly killed by a shell and sniped at when they ran for cover. Witold ...”

“... administration and espionage – made this country a world power? In this meditation I found David Kynaston a sympathetic companion. Not that he has anything of interest to say about Lloyd’s: this oversight is one of my many frustrations with his excellent book. But he is deeply interested in the nature of the City, in what made it successful then and ...”

“... either between classes or between good and bad deeds: the sins and errors of Adam and Jacob and David are as important as the humility and obedience of Abraham and Moses.’ There are, of course, moral judgments in the Bible, but the Bible is not a moral tale, a collection of exempla, for all that Jews and Christians alike have often read so. Nor is it a ...”

“... up with attempts to win them over. Early on in his tenure, Radji lunches with a helpful figure, David Spanier, the Diplomatic Correspondent of the Times. Spanier tells him that there are only ‘about fifteen to twenty people who are the opinion-makers in the British press and suggests I establish regular dialogues with them. And he warns against attempts ...”

“... Current Biography, July 1976. Edgar L. Doctorow was born in New York City on 6 January 1931 to David R. and Rose Doctorow, whom he has described as ‘old-fashioned social democrats’. His grandparents on both sides were Jewish immigrants from Russia. Doctorow grew up on Eastburn Avenue, in the Bronx. His mother was a pianist and his father had a store in ...”

“... Is there a British Marxism? David McLellan’s new book offers, implicitly, an answer. In his comprehensive survey of ‘Marxism after Marx’, one of the 24 chapters is devoted to British Marxism – and it is almost the shortest in the book. After a brief history of the British Left, he mentions the good work of some Marxist historians and economists ...”

“... David Bindman does not think that Hogarth was joking when he gave one of his contemporaries, John Nichols, a comic demonstration of minimalism: it took the form of a diagram composed of three lines and he claimed that it contained his memory of ‘a Sergeant with his pike going into an Ale House, and his Dog following ...”

“... in an eternity of vain research along endless shelves.’ Jump forward seventy years, and for David Lodge’s Pooteresque Adam Appleby, the BM is a cosy, quintessentially safe asylum. Adam’s working life there is a matter of daily comforting rituals, as when he cools his research-fevered brow on the downstairs men’s lavatory cistern. The BM shelters ...”

“... If this is the case when the ‘facts’ are right, how much more so when they are wrong? Hugh David’s book about Stephen Spender misleads in every way, factually as well as aesthetically, although in the general welter of disinformation it is barely possible to distinguish fact from treatment. As David’s previous ...”

“... enjoyably, I settled in front of a neighbour’s television with a bottle of his wine to watch David Dimbleby interview all three of the main party leaders. It was illuminating. Kinnock hardly seemed the same man as the one on Today in Parliament: he was in control both of himself and of the interview. Paddy Ashdown likewise was very impressive, and Major ...”

“... reluctantly set up in 1954 by Lord Kilmuir in his previous incarnation as the Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe. He had assumed that the Report would silence those calling for reform and to that end appointed the ultra-respectable public school headmaster Sir John Wolfenden to chair it. When Wolfenden recommended that homosexual acts between consenting ...”

“... grow accustomed from childhood: the most menacing army in the region is described here as if it is David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis themselves even further: we now appear to be a lynch-mob culture, glued to our televisions, incited by a premier whose ‘leadership’ is being launched and ...”

“... assassination. Every version of Tony Hancock’s life zooms in on his alcoholism and depression. David Bellos does not, in the case of Jacques Tati, have a ruthless control freak or incurable melancholic on his hands, although even his book contains one or two tales of debts unpaid, employees exploited and lapses into despair. (A very small price to pay for ...”

“... British children had been reduced. These memories were refreshed by reading Austerity Britain, David Kynaston’s huge history of the country between 1945 and 1951. It is difficult for anyone familiar only with the shimmering prosperity of contemporary Western Europe to realise just what it was like in the years immediately after the Second World War. In ...”