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“... government to power.’ (Nor a Labour one, for that matter; the turning point for me came when David Miliband claimed that they’d been ‘punished enough’ for the Iraq War: ‘Well, you haven’t actually been voted out of office,’ I growled.) The gloom quickly gave way to a sense of the advantages. For a start the voters might have fallen a little ...”

“... of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d be sick. Whose United Kingdom? Theirs. The Eton Mess and their cronies. Big Business. Neocons. The warmongers. Not ours. We left Edinburgh at ...”

“... own translation and commentary on the most literary of all the Bible’s narratives, the story of David. The translation is conservative, fully in line with the Authorised Version (and all the better for that). The commentary is up to date, absorbing not only the latest scholarship but concentrating on the extraordinary narrative power of the story of family ...”

“... disgrace and departure, and then to a bitter contest for the succession with John Pardoe, gave David Steel an almost impossible task. He was 39, but looked younger, a slight figure with an easy smile, a son of the Scottish manse, neither obviously at home with scholars, like Grimond, or in London society, like Thorpe. ‘The boy ...”

“... is dying, and there is a voice in her ear saying strange things. The voice belongs to a young boy, David, but he isn’t her son. At this point the novel doesn’t even look much like a novel – there are no quotation marks for speech, and David’s words are distinguished from Amanda’s by italics – and, just like in a ...”

“... The​ day David died, I was in the Urbana Free Library, in the How to Organise section. I was always searching for ways to corral my home. Paper and books were my biggest downfall, but clothes didn’t stay on hangers and dishes multiplied. A lot of things multiplied. Especially books about how to organise your house ...”

“... In what her publishers claim to be the first monograph in English on David, Dr Brookner explains that she sees her book as a ‘preparation’ for more specialised studies at present under way in France and America. It is intended ‘for the general reader whose eye has been arrested by David’s images and whose mind has been haunted or irritated by their supernal energy and conviction ...”

“... seat of government in the Piazza della Signoria, he stopped in front of Michelangelo’s 15-foot David. He didn’t see in it a symbol of the Florentine nation or even identify the figure. For the abbé, it was ‘a great phantasm of white marble, well worked and all of one piece’ (‘ung grand fantosme de marbre blanc, bien ouvre et tout dune ...”

“... is only death here now.’ Only death apart from her and the severed head of an android called David. She is going to connect him to his separated body, and he will steer the ship to another planet. They haven’t got on well during the movie – ‘We have had our differences,’ the android says in his formal, English manner – but perhaps need and ...”

“... writer? Not me, at any rate. The Garden of Eden is studded with provincial delicacies Elizabeth David would be proud of (‘jamon serrano, a smoky, hard-cured ham from pigs that fed on acorns’) and dramatic narratives of eating and drinking that might please M.F.K. Fisher. The book is a sort of domestic novel, a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and the good.Simón’s self-appointed task in the new life is to look after a small boy, David, who, he thinks, lost a document that would lead him to his mother on the boat over. (The details aren’t clear thanks to ‘the waters of forgetting’, in which people speak repeatedly of being ‘washed clean’.) In time, Simón becomes convinced that ...”

“... be referring to any one of several Dickens novels; in fact, we know that he must be talking about David Copperfield – the very classic that Holden Caulfield mocks in the opening sentence of Salinger’s book. Is it likely that a hard-pressed secondary school teacher in an Appalachian town in the late 20th century would assign his pupils a whole Dickens ...”

“... Some sixty years ago, when David Thomson was a boy, he suffered from a condition that badly affected his eyesight. He could see, but poorly. He read Braille and, though this was forbidden, the printed page. On two occasions, when the condition grew worse, he was condemned to spend six weeks at a time lying on his back in a darkened room ...”

“... a fungoid growth or eruption used as an image for the progress of love. A civil servant called David, his grey hair dyed, has come to visit his ex-wife, Stella: he brings with him his new partner, Catherine, but he is already sick of her and obsessed with a third woman, the pleasingly trollopy Dina. David accompanies ...”