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“... David Freedberg’s new book is illustrated with wonderful, detailed drawings and engravings of plants, fungi, fossils, birds, insects and animals – nearly all made in the 17th century. Freedberg is an art historian; the starting point of his book is a dream he had sometime before 1986 in which Anthony Blunt appeared holding a drawing of an orange ...”

“... from adult cells, the conclusion that adult mammals could not be cloned, a journalistic hoax (David Rorvik’s announcement that he had helped a wealthy eccentric clone himself), a brilliant experimentalist (Karl Illmensee) accused of faking results, and, finally, a small band of mavericks working outside the prestigious centres of biotechnology in the ...”

“... came naturally to Boswell, less naturally but effectively in the sentences of Adam Smith and David Hume, but at the cost of the reservation of the Scottish tongue for casual, domestic or low-life use. Yet, as Daiches reminds us, with an exceptionally happy choice of quotations, the literary endeavours of the upper class were accompanied by a genuine ...”

“... agonies of his later attachments (usually to actresses, and most dramatically to Mrs Patrick Campbell, the original Eliza Doolittle) confirmed Shaw’s conviction that ‘the quantity of love that an ordinary person can stand without serious damage is about ten minutes in 50 years.’ For Gibbs, however, Shaw’s love life is both more extensive (he ...”

“... things​ in the relations between authors and publishers never change. Dear Mr Murray, edited by David McClay (John Murray, £16.99), a collection of letters written to six generations of the Murray family, is full of familiar complaints. Jane Austen was ‘very much disappointed … by the delays of the printers’. Maria Rundell, author of A New System of ...”

“... only a couple of weeks ago and giving entirely good reasons why Gordon Brown was on top and David Cameron on the ropes now look faintly embarrassing. But at the beginning of October Brown was on top and no one can be faulted for failing to see his impending humiliation. Nor could they have predicted that the abandonment of a premature general election ...”

“... at the Hutton Inquiry, Jonathan Powell, the prime minister’s chief of staff, wrote to Alastair Campbell and David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser, of an early draft of the September dossier on Iraq’s WMD programme: ‘I think it is worth explicitly stating what TB keeps saying: this is the advice from the ...”

“... other, and the points at which the need is and is not symmetrical, are at the heart of the plot of David Malouf’s (in two senses) exemplary novel. It answers, in almost Tolstoyan terms, questions about how we should, and do, lead the lives we are given. Returning from the war, from the prison camps on the Burma railway where life was cheap, Digger looks ...”

“... Excalibur perhaps, links up the parts of the novel and is symbolic in its action. A Welshman, David Jones, runs away to sea, survives the sinking of the Titanic, becomes a cook in New York, marries Ludmilla, the daughter of his Russian employer, returns to Wales and the First World War. He is in Ireland during the Rebellion and, because he is posted as ...”

“... contemporaries. But they were not left to be admired – except in details like the rock the David stands on, where rusticity was appropriate. Rodin’s way of leaving figures half in and half out of the block, and letting the lines show where piece-moulds joined on bronzes, was evidence of his tenderness for the unfinished state – but these things can ...”

“... for the family firm, fundamentally different characters. The wonder, however, is not that ‘David’ should have turned out badly but that ‘Bertie’ should have turned out so well. (There were two more brothers, ‘Harry’ of Gloucester and George of Kent, whose capacity for kingship, had the succession moved further down the line, was for different ...”

“... when it comes to sounding out the limits of what they achieved. I had finished writing this when David Anfam’s catalogue raisonné of Rothko’s work came to hand. This first volume lists and illustrates all the paintings on canvas. They are reproduced more or less in proportion and are presented in chronological order. The catalogue illustrations thus ...”

“... records in all. County lists and herbarium sheets were searched for older records. One lesson of David Elliston Allen’s earlier book The Naturalist in Britain was that this kind of disciplined collaboration can get good scientific work out of the essentially inefficient engine of amateur natural history. There is more than one reason for climbing such ...”

“... and then in America, built an experimental scanner which used a computer to reconstruct images. David Kuhl transmitted the first image of a living human thorax in 1965, using a radioactive source and a computer monitor, while Ronald Bracewell, back in the Fifties, had done work on the mathematics of image reconstruction in the context of radio ...”

“... to. In 1987, in the catalogue published to accompany an exhibition about the Harlem Renaissance, David Levering Lewis referred to Larsen as ‘the mysterious and lovely Virgin Islander’. Eight years later, in When Harlem Was in Vogue, Lewis relayed the (unsourced) information that Larsen was looked down on by ‘some of her fellow Virgin Islanders’ for ...”