“... the homosexual artist, had converged to discuss painting and the human condition. The thought that David Sylvester and Francis Bacon were caught up in this dialogue seemed at once daunting and salutary to some of us then learning to paint in the same town. Their Interviews – first published in 1975 – conveyed such unassailable aplomb. ‘All art has now ...”

“... reproach. Progressive rabbis may not be allowed to disturb the even tenor of their lives. In 1988, David Forman, a Reform rabbi, founded Rabbis for Human Rights, an organisation which has been an advocate for the rights of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, though its effectiveness is limited. At the beginning of October, it helped to rebuild homes in ...”

“... of influence on the mathematical side. Queneau’s ‘Les Fondements de la littérature d’après David Hilbert’ treats Hilbert’s claim that instead of points, lines and planes you might just as easily say ‘tables, chairs and beermugs’ as an invitation to make a further move to ‘words, sentences and paragraphs’. Given that aspects of the Hilbert ...”

“... politics, then? Not exactly. ‘He was his party’s most fertile ideas man at Westminster since David Lloyd George, perhaps since Gladstone,’ Barberis blurts out in his final section, almost as though he has just thought of it, reassuring himself by adding: ‘That is what he was – an ideas man, not a political philosopher or even the careful crafter of ...”

“... the Cave Rescue gets called out to find some students who have gone pot-holing and not come up. A young caver from our village, David Anderson, is one of the rescue team. The water is rising and as he is going down he slips into a narrow gulley. Though he is roped up, the force of the torrent is too much for his ...”

“... priggishness I dislike so intensely.’ Poets with whom she became involved – George Barker and David Gascoyne, for example – are sadly unrecognisable now as the vibrant young bucks she saw or imagined half a century ago. (She had a sharp eye, though, for dirty nails, mean and common facial expressions and weak ...”

“... for monumental mockery (‘This England’), the obituary which said plummily: ‘Any sketch of David Glass’s work would be incomplete without reference to his amour propre, the history of his subject.’ Over in America, I miss the Times obituaries more than anything else from the English public prints. The USA has no counterpart. The New York Times ...”

“... on by the medical profession, set out to curb the tobacco industry. They were Kenneth Robinson and David Owen (Labour) and Sir George Young (Tory). All three were routed. The hardest fighter of the three was Sir George Young. His determination to cut down, for instance, on tobacco’s ...”

“... At 11.32 on a cold morning in London early last year six young men, who had been on a spending spree and had mailed 203 lb of women’s cocktail dresses, children’s toys and ties back to Baghdad, entered and took over the Iranian Embassy in Princes Gate. It was not immediately clear who they were or why they were there, but soon Scotland Yard learnt that behind the stuccoed facade overlooking Hyde Park there were 19 hostages, among them a British policeman ...”

“... jobs and food, but excluding Social Security, Medicaid and unemployment insurance). To this Mr David Stockman, Director of the Office of Management and Budget (who found the book about single men so Promethean) responds with optimism. Of 16.5 million poor people (living on less than $12,600 a year for a family of four), only ‘47 per cent would suffer a ...”

“... Charlotte von Stein in Iphigenia and the ironic-painful expression of his old man’s fancy for a young girl in the Marienbad Elegies. This characteristic of Goethe’s art – seeking in each work the right form to express poetically his own recent raw experience – is one to which T.J. Reed, in his excellent account of Goethe in Weimar, The Classical ...”

“... should fall for this Parisian nonsense, but makes a more positive attempt to convict the young man of heresy. He claims, quite rightly, that Lodge uses a very limited set of structuralist tools, but thinks that he has lost the caution that marked his earlier ventures, and is ‘now ready to practise structuralism in the open streets’. And although ...”

“... senior by six years, included scenes of sadism and violence (by an older stepbrother to a young boy) in an early novel, but expressed no strong feelings elsewhere about the treatment of her sister. Jane Emery says that Rose ‘felt remorse’ at Eleanor’s death in 1952: ‘I feel now that I should have put more in our relationship.’ As remorse ...”

“... destroyers. How does Jaffa look on a Palestinian day out? The promenade remains totally Israeli. Young and old, many of them super-fit, power along on feather-light bikes, hoverboards or electric scooters, or jog with iPhones strapped to their arms. Ordinary pedestrians are on maximum alert. Then there’s the stretch of grass below the promenade, above the ...”

“... time the lonely outsider commemorated by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and (more cannily) Wordsworth. David Fairer maintains that their Wertherisation of Chatterton’s alleged suicide concentrated the Romantic poets’ minds on their own social isolation, on the necessary dissidence of the poet’s task and the short time reserved for its performance. Chatterton ...”