“... outstripped anyone’s claim to possess their own story. Here he is writing to his oldest friend, David Peltz, who is thinly fictionalised as Woody Selbst in the story ‘A Silver Dish’ and as George Swiebel in Humboldt’s Gift. ‘What matters,’ Bellow wrote to Peltz when he complained of being used, is that good things get written … We’ve known ...”

“... candidate from the minuscule parliamentary left. This strategy had worked before: last time round David Miliband nominated Diane Abbott as a candidate. In 2015 they hoped a left candidate would take away support from Andy Burnham, who was what passed for leftish, leaving the door open for Liz Kendall or Yvette Cooper. Enter Jeremy Corbyn stage left. He may ...”

“... Eurosceptic ministers and former ministers, such as Iain Duncan Smith, Nigel Lawson and David Owen. Then there’s Grassroots Out, which was supposed to bring the other two lots together. But the prospectus on offer has been muddied because the spokesmen within each organisation have had different ideas. Johnson in particular changes his ideas once ...”

“... to pretend that these underlying concerns don’t need addressing.There were​ precedents for David Cameron’s decision to go to the people in June 2016: there have been 13 referendums in various parts of the UK since 1973; the Victorian deference to a parliamentary elite has gone, and with good reason. What was indisputably poor statesmanship was the ...”

“... of Christianity, together with a large portion – all but the prophetic and poetical books, if David Daniell is correct, as he almost certainly is, in attributing to Tyndale the translation he prints of Joshua to II Chronicles – of the Old Testament. Tyndale’s translation lies at the base of almost all subsequent English renderings, the Authorised ...”

“... like John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl and Agents of Innocence by the American writer David Ignatius. In recent years, however, a number of scandals have badly tarnished the reputation of Israel’s security services and stimulated calls for greater public accountability. One of the most damaging blows was struck by Victor Ostrovsky – like the ...”

“... parties. The key portfolios in the new government went to the members of Shamir’s Likud Party. David Levy, a populist of Moroccan origins, became Foreign Minister. Mr Levy does not speak English. But since little more than a dialogue of the deaf with the United States was likely on the peace process, this was not considered a severe handicap. Moshe ...”

“... of narrative clarity, which enables Time in a Red Coat to resonate, powerfully, in our minds. David Malouf makes no bones about going to work on his novels as if he were constructing a poem. If I may retranslate a passage from an interview quoted in a French magazine (which shows that his reputation has already spread well beyond the boundaries of his ...”

“... large Jewish population, and Guillem himself was a Jew, perhaps a practising one, of the house of David. (Other versions not quoted here treat him as a Christian hero who ended his days as a monk.) Attempting to explain what they see as the quite extraordinary importance attached to Merovingian descent, the connections between the Merovingians and the Grail ...”

“... of the Just War doctrine, not at cities, but at military targets. Three of the books under review, David Owen’s A future that will work and Ken Coates’s The Most Dangerous Decade as well as Objections to Nuclear Defence, cite with approval Lord Mountbatten’s famous Strasbourg speech of 11 May 1979, about which one of the most notable circumstances was ...”

“... its Parliamentary staff, one of its political correspondents, and its Parliamentary sketch-writer David McKie. Frank Johnson, restored to the back page of the Times after a disappointing sojourn abroad, and Edward Pearce of the Daily Telegraph, are representative of the sketch-writing-as-entertainment school. McKie is more thoughtful. The political team on ...”

“... much about a shrinking jobs market, which may be one reason things appear to have gone so wrong at David Cameron’s favourite welfare-to-work consultancy, A4e. So if we’re not talking about a total overhaul of employment practices in the advanced economies – which would, I accept, be no more realistic than that office-as-playground flim-flam – what ...”

“... than sixty galleries, at a cost of $450 million. Roughly half of this great sum came from the late David Rockefeller, longtime chairman of the board (his mother, Abby, was a co-founder of the museum), and the other half from just four people: the hedge fund billionaires Leon Black, Kenneth Griffin and Steven Cohen, and the media mogul ...”

“... to City Limits as part of a strategy to get herself a job at the Guardian, then in the designer David Hillman’s font-butting, G2-adding incarnation: she loved the Guardian intimately, like a lover, the way it cropped its pictures, its Garamond and Helvetica and heavy rules. I, on the other hand, was completely clueless. Between Deborah and Nick ...”

“... tough keeping track of all the debutantes promenading into print and creating a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and guru-mentor-mindgamer ...”