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“... man who has been in the hospital for 19 years. Walter (the subject of an earlier novel by David Cook) has been emotionally damaged and mentally stunted by childhood sufferings. He speaks rarely and reluctantly, knowing that his voice sounds like ‘a fart in a bath of soapy water’. But he is a complete human being, fully capable of thought and ...”

“... exclude that particular thread from the multicoloured skein of English achievement. Sunrising, by David Cook, is also a first historical novel, though its author has received justifiable praise for earlier writings like the dramatically successful Walter. You could say that it was written from a very different point in the political spectrum from ...”

“... grace without its looking like self-satisfaction. An answer is suggested, as it happens, in David Cook’s marvellous Missing Persons. We are quite unaware, as this humorously sordid saga of bread and marge, tinned beans, false teeth, betting shops, adverts, punks, child prostitutes and novelty key-rings progresses, full of implausible chance ...”

“... When Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food appeared in 1950, many of the ingredients it called for were unobtainable. But even after meat came off the ration, few people can have had much practical need for a traditional Turkish recipe for stuffing a whole sheep. That was not the point. Saturated with description, of figs and aubergines, of fishing boats at anchor in Marseille and paella pans left out to dry in Spanish courtyards, Mediterranean Food brought a beakerful of the warm South to chilly, postwar England ...”

“... All in all, I get the feeling that TV overrates its audience’s blood-lust, or squirmlust. Take David Dimbleby’s grilling of Tony Blair on Panorama. Most of the interview was spent raking over Blair’s Old Labour past. At first this line seemed fair enough. Blair, after all, had on that very day been assuring his new City chums that almost nothing the ...”

“... but it did not fundamentally change its course. Like that of his longer lived contemporary David Jones (born five years after Rosenberg, in 1895), Rosenberg’s writing displays a sense of the continuity between a past passionately experienced through poetry and spiritual tradition, and a nearly intolerable present. Rosenberg’s parents were Russian ...”

“... Archigram was an out-of-hours architectural band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly original, sometimes on the money, sometimes woeful, often funny, reliably coarse ...”

“... he regularly voiced was that at the house we rented in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1963 he had saved David Frost from drowning. In later years I saw him quite seldom, though if he’d seen something you’d done on television he’d generally telephone, ostensibly to congratulate you but actually to congratulate you on having got away with it yet ...”

“... the author to provide something more than a lesson in how to suck eggs. Stephen Gilbert and John Cook (along with just about everyone else) would agree that Potter reached his reflexive nadir with Blackeyes, in which the story of the eponymous model based on the central character, Jessica, is related as a novel authored by Jessica’s uncle, but rewritten by ...”

“... Vernon Howell​ – better known as David Koresh – arrived at Mount Carmel, the Texas base of a Seventh Day Adventist splinter sect called the Branch Davidians, in the summer of 1981. He was 21 years old and looking for a new church. A ‘wandering bonehead’, as he would later describe himself, he had been kicked out of a mainstream Seventh Day Adventist congregation in Tyler, Texas for having sex with the 15-year-old daughter of a church elder (or at least trying to), and for refusing to stop haranguing church leaders about the correct interpretation of scripture ...”

“... with Europeans, not only regarded the white men as superior beings, but also took Captain Cook to be their god Lono, a very important one in their world, which was tilled with gods. Or, is that story a European myth in itself, subsequently foisted on Hawaiian self-memory by British and other foreign chroniclers? The latter is the thesis of Gananath ...”

“... obtaining from the butcher’s shop in Céret, perhaps explaining the title). ‘Pastry Cook of Cagnes’ (c.1922) The attraction of uniforms to Soutine seems to have been largely the opportunity they offered for painting uniform areas of colour, enlivened by tiny touches of chromatic variation – an excuse for pure painting. ...”

“... name is Glasse discovers his métier by the camp fire and is assured by his mentor that ‘a good cook, even on Board of Trade allowance, has brought many a ship to port that ‘ud otherwise ’ave mut’nied on the’igh seas.’ For a hundred and fifty years, ever since the best jobs in London kitchens began going to Frenchmen and later Italians, the ...”

“... What’s all this fuss about cooks and chefs? The how-to-cook sections of bookshops are as big as the how-to-be-successful-in-life sections; it’s no longer clear where one ends and the other begins. Many of the books sell themselves not so much as sources of practical information – how to make a wild mushroom risotto – but as windows onto both the skills and the emotional life of a celebrity cook ...”

“... an almost unanimous reluctance to refer in any way to these delicate matters. An exception was The Cook Report, an investigative programme on commercial television, which in 1994 laid an elaborate trap. Using actors pretending to be businessmen, the programme-makers approached Sir Michael Grylls, long-standing Tory MP for North-West Surrey, and introduced ...”