“... tendencies. The academic careers to be built on theory had largely been built; the hardest-core young Derridean among our teachers later drifted off into management consultancy and wasn’t alone in doing so. And the French-style rhetorical flourishes that some of us were quite taken with didn’t always survive first contact with the actually existing ...”

“... of great fiction do not change, much,’ Zadie Smith wrote eight years ago in an essay about David Foster Wallace. ‘But the means do.’ She was between novels: three years had passed since her most traditional, On Beauty, was published; NW, her most experimental, wouldn’t appear for another four. But, as sometimes happens, the changes on the surface ...”

“... between Collier and her friend Sarah Fielding, author of the sentimental novel The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and contributor to her brother Henry’s Joseph Andrews (1742). They had worked together before – Collier wrote a preface for the 1753 sequel to David Simple, and in 1749 they both produced critical ...”

“... Holocaust since the end of the 1980s (the first intifada), and its return into Hebrew literature (David Grossman’s See under: Love). The Holocaust is part of the victim imagery, hence the madness of state-subsidised school trips to Auschwitz. This has less to do with understanding the past than with reproducing an environment in which we exist in the ...”

“... punishment to one of reform. The report also recommended the development of the borstal system for young offenders and the improvement of prison educational facilities. The argument for reform, however, conflicted with ideas of female depravity. Were women truly accountable for their actions? Were they redeemable? Did they have ‘higher ...”

“... in the body. Nanoparticles of pollution have been found inside the brainstems of even the very young. But you don’t have to wait until birth to see the effects of breathing particulate matter. The impact begins in the womb, damaging the development of lungs and shortening future lives. In 2019, a small-scale study at Hasselt University found particles of ...”

“... In September 1992, David Mellor resigned from the government after concern over an extra-marital affair and a free holiday in Europe. An affair also accounted for Mr Tim Yeo in early 1994. Soon after this resignation, Lord Caithness resigned following the suicide of his wife, which apparently was the result of an affair he had been conducting ...”

“... Many people would say – there stands English comedy,’ David Frost is reported to have declaimed, as Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams stood side by side on his doorstep. Williams was unimpressed. ‘I thought to myself, “Then many people would be lacking in perception,” but shouted drunken goodbyes and reeled down the street into a taxi ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... visitation complaints and defamation suits, and the answers have always been ‘it all depends.’ David Cressy’s excellent book suggests a different approach, examining conflicts over ritual and offering stories rather than statistics. Despite Coverdale, Gouge and the Admonition, a wedding was not only a religious ceremony, but the culmination of weeks or ...”

“... Salman Rushdie’s residence also rates a ‘comfortable’, but he’s in Tufnell Park. David Storey’s pad, on the other hand, is fashionably situated but Honest John Haffenden would be lying if he didn’t tell you it was merely ‘roomy’. Top marks go to Pritchett and to Malcolm Bradbury, who wins a hard-to-come-by ‘elegant’ for his ...”

“... mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan ...”

“... with angelic grace and with a formal complexity which is delightfully difficult to disentangle. David Ekserdjian’s book illustrates all of Correggio’s paintings, great and small, superbly well, together with many of his drawings. In the latter we can watch him weaving his compositions with a nervous pen line; giving them more unity, more softness and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... said about President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s. It wasn’t the oral sex with a young White House intern that they minded; it was that Clinton lied about it. This is what puritans sound like when they’re trying to be liberals. So what’s the big deal about hypocrisy? Why is it worse secretly to violate moral standards you say publicly you ...”