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“... was preceded by Paris (1810-13), where he spent a year ‘beneath the eye’ of Jacques-Louis David. Here he received the full stamp of French neoclassicism. But David, whom Eckersberg described as a ‘very rigorous and precise teacher’, was also ‘against submission to one particular overall style’, and ...”

“... Israel offered Egypt a separate peace. Nasser could have had in 1968-9 what Sadat achieved at Camp David. Indeed, he might have got Gaza as well. But Nasser was opposed to Egypt’s deserting its allies and concluding a separate peace. ‘The West Bank,’ he declared, ‘is more important to me than Sinai.’ The substitution of Nixon for Johnson made no ...”

“... The earlier plays of David Mamet seemed to spring from a meeting between Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, as if the characters from The Caretaker or The Homecoming had caught the American anxieties of Death of a Salesman. Pinter is also never far from the later plays, and he directed Oleanna in London; but other, more oblique influences now hover in the air ...”

“... Bible into Chinese. (‘He boned up feverishly on Manchu,’ enthuses his other biographer, David Williams, in his schoolboyish way.) Borrow had to argue in Russian with the Tsar’s board of censors, hire and supervise ill-educated Estonian compositors to set up Mongolian print (which, he said, ‘differs little from the Mandchou’) and prepare to ...”

“... David Foster Wallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of couple who read each other Ulysses in bed while holding hands. Jim read David and his younger sister Amy Moby-Dick as a bedtime story. It wasn’t inevitable that the boy would grow up to write an epic novel, but it wasn’t accidental ...”

“... him before he could put them into practice. Liz Truss showed barely any interest in the job. David Lidington came and went without a trace in just seven months. David Gauke, a relative fixture with a term of eighteen months, had to renationalise the probation service, at a cost of about half a billion pounds. Raab’s ...”

“... median age as somewhere in the early thirties. People were smartly dressed, as if going on a date. David, our instructor, a writer, fashion stylist and therapist, was carefully dressed too, and his rather priestlike collar and air of great calm made me feel obscurely guilty as he laid out the evening’s programme. Yet apart from one pretty, nervous woman, who ...”

“... gratifying that people die while watching it, round and round for ever, in an endless loop. David Foster Wallace always had trouble finishing his novels. And yet he put in this one a thought so absorbing and delightful that you could easily imagine yourself, like the rat in the experiment, pressing the lever over and over. ‘Thousands of times an ...”

“... in three periods of 14 generations apiece (not even Vermes knows why). He begins with Abraham and David and departs from ancient practice in naming five women in his list. One of these is Mary, the mother of Jesus. The others are all non-Jews, and three of them are associated with marital irregularities: Tamar seduced her father-in-law, Rahab was a ...”

“... This is the case even among non-Jewish cartoonists. A particularly striking case is that of David B. (né Pierre-François Beauchard), whose autobiographical L’Ascension du haut mal (1996-2003) is available in a single-volume English translation called Epileptic. The ‘epileptic’ is Pierre-François’s elder brother, Jean-Christophe, and the book ...”

“... In their foreword to the predictably dismaying Higher Education White Paper, Vince Cable and David Willetts deploy the standard language of the marketplace: the Higher Education Funding Council for England will take on ‘a major new role as a consumer champion’; ‘universities will be under competitive pressure to provide better quality and lower cost’ because they’ll be ‘responding to student demand ...”

“... as in the lion and the bull’, and then hints that this may be why Michelangelo portrayed David frowning. But surely an explanation would only be needed if David, who is waiting for the big kill, was not frowning. Summers also wants to believe that someone introduced the young Michelangelo to the 12th Olympic ...”

“... the hobnailed boot can be wielded with just as much delicacy and skill as the épée, once said of David Owen that the Good Fairy who attended his birth had generously bestowed upon him the three qualities of charm, intelligence and good looks. He is then reported to have added: ‘What a pity that the Bad Fairy made him a shit.’ This is a pretty cruel thing ...”

“... David Womersley’s massive and elegant edition of Gibbon is the better timed because it comes a century after the edition scholars have been obliged to use as the nearest to a critical text. It was in 1896 that J.B. Bury brought out the first volume of his edition, which he reissued in 1909 and which until now has been considered standard ...”

“... 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 ...”