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“... Say ‘David Storey’ and readers of my (and his) generation will recall the final shot of This Sporting Life: Frank Machin (Richard Harris), mired, spavined, raising himself on the rugby field to lurch back into hopeless battle. His life as a professional is over. Football chews up its workforce faster even than the pits ...”

“... can be tolerated, and might even be enjoyed, as piano-players in the funhouse of letters. Early in David Plante’s diaries, we find him tinkling away, dropping names in basso profundo, as if knowing people and knowing what they do in private can be the thing that makes one special. He is 28 years old when he comes to London from the US (a little younger than ...”

“... plan for all created things, believers have turned to the Bible to fill in the detail of this grand design. The Bible has traditionally been assumed to be congruent with the religious system (variously Jewish or Christian) in conjunction with which it has been read. In the last few years literary critics have been engaged on what many of them see as a ...”

“... to fillet felines these days.’ Some of us followed Doom because we thought we were too cool for David Blaine. Doom’s tricks were breath control, intricate rhyme schemes, a beating heart beneath the cold veneer, of which he gave us only occasional glimpses. Now you see it, now you don’t.In his six solo studio albums, numerous collaborations and ...”

“... lost some of its freedom and self-assurance when it ascended from the intermediate to the grand style. As long as he was translating the sublime into the fashionable, he was inventive and sure of his ground: when he reversed the process and attempted to raise the fashionable into the sublime, he became less certain of his powers and therefore more ...”

“... not enough to confirm the greatness of greatness; we want to know our business with the dead. David Marr unfolds it, steadily, over seven hundred pages. The first vindication of his huge and wonderful book is that it offers ways into all of White’s work, uncovering materials which were taken up and transformed in the making of the novels, the stories ...”

“... that he stood on top of the Vendôme Column in place of his uncle’s statue, he was struck, as David Baguley points out in Napoleon III and His Regime, not by the glory but by the loneliness. In Ham, he wrote a pamphlet on ‘L’Extinction du paupérisme’, explaining, in effect, how much better everything would be if he could just be allowed to get on ...”

“... In March​ 1960, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York. Eight years earlier, Germany had agreed to pay millions of marks in reparations to Israel, but the two countries had yet to establish diplomatic relations. Adenauer’s language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a ‘fortress of the West’ and ‘I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone ...”

“... Noel Annan will be best remembered for Our Age, his grand, confident and sometimes very funny memoir written in the late 1980s, looking back at that generation of the British élite which came of age between the two world wars and so (as the book’s subtitle claimed) ‘made postwar Britain’. Here he reflected on their social connections, their shifting political and intellectual priorities, their sexual preferences, and their apparently glittering careers ...”

“... succeeded in keeping much of the evidence from reaching the courts. In 1977, however, a Federal Grand Jury began its investigation into Sindona’s involvement in the Franklin Bank. Sindona’s mind now seems to have become unhinged. In July 1979 he broke his $3 million bail in New York and had himself kidnapped so that he could return to Italy. His ...”

“... The last part of that final sentence is redacted because it concerns something still under a grand jury investigation. Who knows what happened next? The Hitchcock version might have been interesting. As it was, in January 2016 Page volunteered for the Trump campaign on an unpaid basis. He had no evident qualifications: a few years at Merrill Lynch, a ...”

“... path to greatness, Kissinger a president who would take him along for the ride. They loved talking grand strategy together because it made each man feel like he had the world in the palm of his hand. When Nixon went to China in 1972, an opening crafted for him by Kissinger, they both got their rewards. Nixon was feted as visionary and Kissinger as a strategic ...”

“... David Reubeni​ posed a puzzle to contemporaries; he still poses one today. The Mediterranean world was turbulent in the early decades of the 16th century. The Ottoman Empire toppled the Mamluks in 1517, giving the sultan control over Egypt, Syria and much of the Arabian Peninsula; Western Christian rulers feared that they might be next ...”

“... only adjective in all these references, is ‘naive’. Allegories of Reading thus opens with a grand gesture of false humility, an inside joke for the elect: ‘I began to read Rousseau seriously in preparation for a historical reflection on Romanticism and found myself unable to progress beyond local difficulties of interpretation.’ De Graef gives a ...”

“... to hold apart the irresistible gravity and closure of the Earth’s crust. Muir called it ‘a grand page of mountain manuscript that I would gladly give my life to be able to read’, then did just that, moving across it with the freedom of a flying, swimming creature. He knew it through shepherding and sawmill working; he sensed the curve of its ...”