“... reader a recognisable stock character. This is Ronald Reagan, here renamed President O’Reilly. (David Lodge’s version, ‘Ronald Ruck’, was funnier.) D.M. Thomas offers a farcical interview with President O’Reilly in which the old man is so confused that he can only answer the question before the last:     ‘What is your outlook on ...”

“... to be swapped by plastic surgery with a part of Anne’s nose (Philip’s advice here: ‘By all means rub your new chin but don’t pick it’), making him slavishly follow his grandmother’s advice about meeting new people: Start off by putting strangers at their ease. ‘Have you come far?’ They always like that one. And always ask how many years ...”

“... consider the facts without venturing to interpret them. One of the first accounts of Buchenwald, David Rousset’s L’Univers Concentrationnaire, is rather weak on facts, but offers a welter of interpretations – glorifying the strength and discipline of organised Communism in the camp, yet making the connection with Kafka, Ubu and the ‘absurd’. This ...”

“... in which Uriah Heep – ‘looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight’ – explains to David Copperfield the experiences that showed him the value of being ’umble. ‘Dickens was a great connoisseur of hypocrisy,’ she writes, ‘yet he was not obsessive about it ... Why has his sense of humanity been so rare? Why are people so overwhelmed by ...”

“... about the brief moment of joy he felt when he saw the planes fly into the twin towers – ‘David beating Goliath’ – at which point ‘you’ (Liev Schreiber) turns firm and Bruce Willis-like and says: ‘and you wonder why your family is being threatened.’ Changez is seen giving a lecture at Lahore University and bellowing ‘We will wipe the ...”

“... for the episodes, or tell us that the cast of O’Dea’s Your Man consisted of Jimmy O’Dea and David Kelly, or that Th’Oul Lad of Kilsalaher featured Danny Cummins and Máire Hastings. All a bit half-hearted. I can find only one video clip online of Flann O’Brien being interviewed, from 1964. It’s astonishingly depressing – the man is so ...”

“... Royal Court. Isabelle Torrance insists on tragic drama’s deep religious roots. The word tragedy means ‘goat song’, and although we don’t know exactly why, it probably alludes to the drama’s ritual, even sacrificial origins. Robert Cowan remarks that tragedy ‘was born under tyranny but flowered under democracy’, though Mitchell Greenberg notes ...”

“... Hamas controlled the zakat committees the HLF used and that by distributing humanitarian aid by means of those committees, the HLF had helped Hamas win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Palestinian people. None of the seven committees identified as suspect by the prosecution had ever been proscribed as a terrorist organisation and no one connected with them ...”

“... excuse for befogging the reader. Montaillou was, last October, the subject of an attack by David Herlihy in Social History on the grounds of inaccurate handling of its source material. The specific accusation was of mistranslation from the Latin, and of the irrelevant introduction of material about incidents elsewhere. There is also the problem of ...”

“... have big ideas.’ The old Clause IV, a plainly expressed commitment to common ownership of the means of production, is replaced by an unctuous formula which promises everything and nothing at the same time. The shift of language disguises a U-turn in political direction. The demand for a publicly directed economy becomes a demand for a ‘dynamic ...”

“... Killer. A white man scalped. A white man disappeared, a white boy kidnapped. It was Biblical, David v. Goliath. But Wilson was disturbed by that.’ It’s a way of writing that recalls the staccato beat of three-dot journalism, and Alexie’s reliance on it suggests that he is trying to put everything simply and clearly, so that readers don’t make the ...”

“... explain and go to check the newspapers. The Independent has a well-informed and balanced piece by David McKittrick on the genesis of the ceasefire. He seems cautiously optimistic. Not so that other old ham, Conor Cruise O’Brien, writing on the same newspaper’s opinion pages. O’Brien sees the timing of the ceasefire as evidence of a Machiavellian plot to ...”

“... part of the century. Filipczak draws attention to the career of another upwardly-mobile painter, David Teniers II, who fashioned a variant of the gallery picture at mid-century: shells, scientific instruments and so on are jettisoned in favour of works of art placed in an environment reminiscent of a modern picture collection, a constcamer. This change of ...”

“... even if (as I suggested a few weeks ago) there was not then the degree of national consensus which David Marquand, in The Unprincipled Society, would have us believe, there was at any rate full employment, or as near to it as a liberal-democratic capitalist society is ever going to get. But just as, in the Thirties, the failure of the previous Labour ...”

“... his backdrop. In single scenes in Prêt-à-Porter, he creates an impression of physical depth by means of overlapping dialogue; over many scenes, by interweaving stories in a fugue-like manner, he creates a secondary, almost synaesthetic effect of stillness and contemplation. Other directors, notably Welles, have used overlapping or polyphonic dialogue, but ...”