“... the artist Rachel Lichtenstein, is one of Sinclair’s most straightforward and absorbing books. David Rodinsky lived above a synagogue at 19 Princelet Street, Whitechapel until he disappeared in 1969. The contours of his life are revealed by the obscure maps, notes, books, clothes and dust that he left behind. But you can see Rodinsky only if you look away ...”

“... was to make major headlines and be more than a support act for the clash of the Davids. With David Cameron boyishly – and buoyantly – installed in the middle of the opposition front bench, the time was at last ripe for overthrowing Kennedy. If the conspirators had waited too much longer, there was always the danger that they might have found coverage ...”

“... at a discount of 50 per cent. Coming under fire at a meeting of the Independent Publishers Guild, David Kneale, the managing director of Waterstone’s, reminded delegates that ‘we have shareholders and have to make a profit.’ He changed tack later, insisting that his first responsibility was to his staff (that wouldn’t include Robert Topping, of ...”

“... pas: his camera kit is clearly visible in the bottom left-hand corner. Not something you’d see David Bailey do.As to how Peter came to take the picture at all, I’m guessing it was arranged at short notice and none of the LRB’s regulars – Chris Killip, Homer Sykes etc – was available. I think the only other portraits he did for the cover were of Ian ...”

“... where they dine with his new colleagues from Brandeis. Sontag has given birth to a son, David. She studies for masters’ degrees in literature and philosophy at Harvard. Herbert Marcuse boards in their house. The tone is one of new maturity in a high-toned world, but there are also floods of tears, feelings of imprisonment, the need to die or ...”

“... the best of these books are the ones we keep rereading. Tokyo Year Zero, the 2007 predecessor to David Peace’s new novel, conforms in its early pages to the first kind of mystery, specifically those described with cool backhandedness by Elizabeth Bowen when she wrote that ‘the only above-board grown-up children’s stories are detective ...”

“... and none of them would have understood the modern relocation of politics below imagination. David Norbrook’s Poetry and Politics in Renaissance England is a protest against the devaluation of political verse, and especially of radical political verse. Where Dr Johnson could deplore Milton’s radicalism yet admire his poetry, Eliot and Leavis expelled ...”

“... saw, took no pleasure in his success and didn’t even enjoy the fact that his son owned Watford FC. Elton’s mother and stepfather visited for Christmas in 1983 after he bought a house, Woodside, on the edge of Windsor Great Park. His mother, he writes, ‘immediately slipped into her old role of managing the house and being foul to the staff’. They ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... there appears a certain natural goodness verging on modesty.’ Three centuries later, in 1956, David Harris Willson’s biography took the hostile line. Scottish historians tended to be fairer, prompting Jenny Wormald to ask in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the ...”

“... I know the Monster, because I have lived in its lair – and my weapon is only the slingshot of David. Martí was the founder of the Cuban nation, the framer of Cuban identity if anyone was, and this doesn’t sound like identification with the United States. Goliath stepped in before David could level the ...”

“... Labour into third place in both of Scotland’s main cities. ‘By the early 21st century,’ David Torrance writes in A History of the Scottish Labour Party, the party ‘appeared to have lost an empire but not yet found a role. The irony was that the party had itself helped to bring about that evidently uncomfortable state of affairs.’ It’s not that ...”

“... murder earlier this year. How did we come to this? In Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder, David Healy goes back to the Greeks and Romans in search of an explanation. There are good reasons for this. Very few people had heard of bipolar disorder before 1980, when it was introduced in the DSM-III – the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric ...”

“... how the birth of one of his children may have helped to shape the birth scenes in Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, how his revulsion at Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents fuelled an article attacking the Pre-Raphaelites in general, or just why that Megalosaurus ‘would have been fresh in Dickens’s memory’ as he wrote the remarkable opening ...”