“... doubts are ‘voxpopulated’, orders ‘spontaneified’, someone arrives ‘envehicled’. David Brookshaw’s dexterity achieves a seemingly effortless fit with Couto’s idiosyncrasies. A virginal heiress, Temporina, ‘hadn’t been legged over, but at least she was worth a legacy’; the ex-Marxist Jonas calls his black market deals ‘my ...”

“... be allowed in this country.’ Lady Austin would have enjoyed Elton John’s ‘marriage’ to David Furnish last year – even the Daily Express managed to celebrate it as a ‘triumph for gay rights’ – in the Windsor Guildhall, where Charles had married Camilla only eight months before. Having arrived in the same year as the Civil Partnership ...”

“... 1974 and 1976 agreements were signed between Israel, Syria and Egypt, culminating in the Camp David Accords signed by Israel and Egypt in 1978. Camp David would form the template for all subsequent negotiations, including the Oslo peace process of the 1990s.Since its inception, Israel had refused to acknowledge the ...”

“... the enviable trick Of barely needing to chat up the chick – From Warren Beatty back to ruddy David. But why the broads latch on to the one bloke Remains what it has always been, a riddle. Byron though famous was both fat and broke While Casanova was a standing joke, His wig awry, forever on the fiddle. Mozart made Juan warble but so what? In Don Giovanni ...”

“... certainly sound more gung-ho to applaud the ‘tough message’ that the courts are conveying, as David Cameron has done, or to say along with John Thornhill, the chairman of the Magistrates Association, that the sheer volume of riot-related criminality justifies disproportionate punishments. But there is a dangerous whiff of bullshit accompanying the ...”

“... his ploughman’s lunch. Their melancholia, though perhaps not their complaceny, is well suited to David Frith’s entertaining and moving new book Silence of the Heart: Cricket Suicides (Mainstream, £14.99). Why is it, Frith asks, that more cricketers top themselves than any other sportsmen? The cases are legion. Take the legendary A.E. Stoddart, the finest ...”

“... Joyce estate is one of the fiercest in the business. Last year, the Irish Times told the story of David Fennessy, a 23-year-old Irish composer studying in Scotland who asked for permission to use 18 words from Finnegans Wake in a three-minute choral piece. Stephen Joyce refused. ‘My wife and I don’t like your music,’ he said. In the recent case, the ...”

“... Factory: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank (Simon and Schuster, £12.99), David Plotz investigates the Repository for Germinal Choice that was founded in California in 1980 by Robert Graham, an ‘eccentric millionaire’, and closed in 1999. The only prize-winner to fess up to having donated was William Shockley, who invented the ...”

“... We acquire mementos: an Eiffel Tower cigarette lighter, a mug from Margate, Michelangelo’s David on a key-ring. All say, in one way or another: ‘I was there.’ It is not just airport art and souvenir-shop knick-knacks that commemorate time in foreign parts. Trophies brought home by Grand Tourists and modern travellers – bits of marble and views of Venice, archaeological finds, sculpture hacked from ancient monuments, exotic pots and textiles – all are mementos as well as art-loot and museum specimens ...”

“... just look what happened to Star Wars. Star Wars, along with Jaws, is regularly cited, not least by David Thomson, as the film that ‘killed the movies’. Glenn Kelly’s answer, in his introduction to A Galaxy Not So Far Away: Writers and Artists on 25 Years of ‘Star Wars’ (Allison and Busby, £9.99), is: ‘Get over it, Dad.’ This selective quotation ...”

“... the dividend of de Gaulle’s 1960s policy make-over – an Arab dividend above all. This is what David Styan, in an unpublished thesis on Franco-Iraqi relations, has called the ‘aggressively mercantilist’ phase of Gaullist foreign policy. By the mid-1970s a reactor in Osirak looked no worse than a reactor in Dimona. Chirac was Giscard’s Prime Minister ...”

“... to take his comrade’s place at roll call, much as Charles Clarke has done following the lovesick David Blunkett’s escape from Cabinet – a strange business on many levels, Blunkett’s repressive record as home secretary aside. For a start, it’s hard to imagine a more venial form of corruption than merely speeding along someone’s visa application. And ...”

“... action figures exist only as bits and bobs in cyberspace’. The man responsible for the site, David Gauntlett, who teaches at the Institute of Communications Studies in Leeds, is clearly a bit of a Giddens fan: note the description of Modernity and Self-Identity as ‘outstanding’. You can also get (if you download and print them) Theory.org.uk ...”

“... Becoming a British citizen is a significant life event,’ the former home secretary David Blunkett writes. ‘The government intends to make gaining British citizenship meaningful and celebratory rather than simply a bureaucratic process.’ The quote is not from Blunkett’s diaries but from the funniest book currently available in the English language, published by the Home Office, and called Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship ...”

“... cadillac, alongside the cans of Diet Coke.The LRB has received a sheet of puffs for The Chief, David Nasaw’s Life of William Randolph Hearst (Gibson Square, £9.99), including one from Conrad Black in the Scotsman. That would be the same Conrad Black who wrote the book’s foreword. A helpful yellow post-it note reads: ‘FYI Conrad Black in the ...”