“... who died on the mountain in 1924, close to the summit, which he and his companion, Andrew Irvine, may or may not have reached. Since then there has been an unseemly rush to cash in on the discovery with at least six books, a poor film made by the BBC, several websites and the syndication of photographic rights across the ...”

“... much of which was composed in verse form – surpassed those of classical poetry. Donne declared David ‘a better poet than Virgil’ and similarly lauded Isaiah. Donne’s sermons have been read by Eng. Lit. in the light of his poems and as guides to them. Some critics have stressed continuities of imaginative or linguistic pattern across the frontier of ...”

“... 11 January. It’s not to disparage David Bowie, but if even a fraction of the tributes being paid to him and his influence were true we would never have had a Conservative government or indeed any government at all. Hearing the news on the Today programme this morning R. nearly cries. I met Bowie only once, at John Schlesinger’s sometime in the 1980s, and remember him as a slight, almost colourless figure, who was somehow Scots ...”

“... translated into French by Perec), Queneau’s Exercises in Style are striking examples of what may be achieved in the mode. Perec joined in 1967 as the group’s youngest member, but one of its most inventive. He excelled in composing bilingual poems, palindromes (his longest is five thousand letters long), exercices d’homosyntaxisme (in which a text ...”

“... After. That work made nonsense of the notion, fostered by Israel’s dynamic first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and his acolytes, that ‘Israel’s leaders sought desperately to make peace with one or all of the Arab states but the Arabs, hell-bent on the destruction of Israel, turned down these overtures and repaid this goodwill with continued ...”

“... of the latest supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own ...”

“... exploited by grizzled old men for their own purposes. Plausible evolutionary explanations for this may be offered in terms of the value of aggression in spreading one’s genes. Outsiders tend to think that a great many such explanations have at most a specious plausibility. Atran has a healthy scepticism, and speaks of just-so stories. An explanation is no ...”

“... then threatened not to pay; and the Commission started legal proceedings against them. They may end up in the dock at the European Court. Future historians of Europe may see the whole story as a constitutional struggle, like royal feuds with the House of Commons in Britain, or federal versus states’ rights in the ...”

“... of a work by someone else. All the same, it is possible to wonder whether the Potter work may not have got through to him, for these Unreliable Memoirs play a similar game. While keeping you aware of what he has since become in journalism and in show business, Clive James climbs back into his shorts and re-enacts the experience of being an outsiderish ...”

“... of porn that the non-pornographic bits should be as tedious and dilatory as possible, which may be one explanation for the dyers’ disputes in Birdsong, but this means that in satisfying his readers’ requirements sooner Faulks is doing them a disservice by not giving them what they don’t want. Perhaps it’s because he has the hope of moving on to ...”

“... facts presented in his account, and in those of pioneering media critics such as Liz Curtis and David Miller, suggest that a more critical verdict would not be out of place.* The early years of broadcasting in Northern Ireland had been safe and somnolent, as Savage describes. After BBC Northern Ireland was established between the wars, its directors quickly ...”

“... a cogent statement of empiricism would be like in any language other than English. This last claim may at first sight seem absurd to anyone who has read the sometimes witty and always rigorous exposition of logical positivist doctrine that appeared in Erkenntnis in its great days. And it is of course true that in the Thirties in Oxford the young A.J. Ayer was ...”

“... that role. Any granddaughter could be proud of Bertie and Tap. But eventually Bertie’s dim son, David, became Lord Redesdale (his elder, grander brother having been killed in action) and David married Tap’s dim daughter, Sydney. David and Sydney did not know how to be Lord and Lady ...”

“... apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a ...”

“... imagery could doubtless be tested statistically; more usefully, writers with a visual handicap may be stimulated to stretch the connotations of words. Trevor-Roper quotes Tennyson’s ‘the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls’ as an example of short-sighted imagery, and the translation by the blind poet W.H. Coates of a stanza from Shelley’s Prometheus ...”