“... yet contains no lees. In going through some reviews of Barnes’s earlier novels, I noticed that David Coward called Flaubert’s Parrot ‘a Modernist text with a 19th-century heart’. By contrast Malcolm Bradbury, in The Modern British Novel, claims that – with its game with notions of the real and the fictional, its making its own rules and its ...”

“... in themselves, and she decides, in her introduction, that she cannot do better than quote David Lowenthal: ‘Even if future insights show up present errors and undermine present conclusions, evidence now available proves that some things almost certainly did happen and others did not.’ Freedman’s parents, Jewish refugees who settled in ...”

“... poets, or on general topics related to allusion: there are pieces on A.E. Housman, Yvor Winters, David Ferry, plagiarism, metaphor and ‘Loneliness and Poetry’. Ricks has a fine ear, as he knows, and is happiest when demonstrating the unique resources and powers of poetry. His method is essentially evaluative, and it depends on precise ...”

“... of earthly things – epidemic disease has been to Euro-American empires. These books – even David Herlihy’s posthumously published account of the Black Death in Europe – are best approached as essays in World History. As Samuel Cohn makes clear in his incisive introduction, Herlihy’s argument that the plague acted as a stimulus to Europe’s ...”

“... Norman Podhoretz). Queenie Leavis of course became an official widow, and it is les veuves on whom David Laskin relies most heavily in this relatively orderly account of sexual and matrimonial chaos. Diana Trilling outlived Lionel by many a book; Mary McCarthy enjoyed the same revenge on Edmund Wilson; the witches of Eastwick (lacking only their Hardwick) have ...”

“... Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight. He is probably right to say that he has a better story about Marlowe’s origins in Canterbury and his doings at Corpus in ...”

“... settle for being remembered for what was said to them as opposed to what they said themselves. David Livingstone went through hell before arriving at Lake Tanganyika in October 1871, but his stories about that journey would never enter the language the way Stanley’s would, when he caught up with him at Ujiji. Fourteen years earlier Livingstone had given ...”

“... view of human endeavour to see the Velocimano as a forerunner of the aeroplane. According to David Herlihy, ‘the bicycle as we know it was largely a product of the Victorian imagination and the tremendous ingenuity that characterised that age.’ Yet Baron Drais himself showed that ingenuity was not always a blessing. In 1837, the Baron appeared in the ...”

“... In the piece by David Bell elsewhere in this issue, a number of lines from an 18th-century French poem are quoted fearlessly in the original. At one time, the question of whether or not to translate them would never have arisen, the editors of a paper like this assuming that a sufficiently high proportion of its readers were comfortable with French for a translation to be both patronising and redundant ...”

“... it has, nonetheless, brought out an annual of its own, The Guardian Year 2002, edited by David McKie (Atlantic, £12.99). And what a year it’s been, seeing among so much else not only the poaching of ace columnist Rod Liddle from his frustratingly behind-the-scenes role at the Today programme but the launch of the tabloid Saturday Review and a new ...”

“... of the Taliban, sometimes for their tactical ability but mostly for their bravery. Major Martin David, whose thoughtfulness made him seem a reluctant warrior, said: ‘Even when they’re onto a complete loser, they insist on pushing forward. On the one hand you have to admire that determination. On the other hand you feel sort of sad. It’s just a shame ...”

“... Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes: There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in ...”

“... image handed down in history books and conversation, which is plainly not good enough.’ It is David Bromwich’s aim in The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke that people should know a good deal more about what Burke actually said and wrote. This is the first of two projected volumes; the second will cover the two great causes of Burke’s later life: the ...”

“... culture. A still more obvious place to look for solid fare is the source book assembled by David Burnley in The History of the English Language. This is, in effect, an anthology of English written between the ninth century and the early 20th. The passages are well chosen both as representative samples of their time and as having inherent ...”

“... them are old Guardian hands with many years’ experience of reporting Egypt and the Middle East. David Hirst, along with Eric Rouleau of Le Monde, is one of the few Western journalists to have received the Edward Said Seal of Approval. Irene Beeson lived for 16 years in one of the poorer districts of Cairo, and knows its people intimately, Together they have ...”