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“... state. The development of the eye has been a favourite test case ever since Darwin. In 1994 Dan-Eric Nilsson and Susanne Pelger looked at how long evolution by natural selection would take to transform a smooth, light-sensitive skin surface to a focusing camera eye. Their ‘pessimistic estimate’ was surprisingly short: a few hundred thousand ...”

“... in art school in LA – the New York of Judson Church and Yvonne Rainer, of Andy Warhol and Patti Smith and Lou Reed. It was disappearing as she arrived, as cities do. She wasn’t sure whether she should be a dancer or artist or filmmaker or writer or musician; what mattered was less what kind of artist than to be one, there. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen ...”

“... For most working people in the great cities, the Empire was first and foremost where you saw Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd. Even in Joseph Chamberlain and Leo Amery’s Birmingham, sixty years or so later, empire did not mean a great deal, to judge by David Cannadine’s memoir of his not very imperial childhood which he appends to his new book. Cannadine’s ...”

“... Dan Jacobson grew up in the diamond town of Kimberley, South Africa. England was one of the places he looked to for inspiration. As it turned out, his interest in English literature and his habit of falling on copies of the New Statesman were ways of sending ahead. From his description of Kimberley on a Saturday afternoon in Time and Time Again (1985), it is obvious why he hankered for another life, the further away the better: Helpless with boredom, stupefied by their own nullity, town and sky yawned at one another ...”

“... history: something Updike learnt from Maxwell. In ‘The Lily-White Boys’ (1986), Celia and Dan Coleman return home from a Christmas party to find their apartment has been burgled, and Dan watches as his wife tries on her old evening dresses: ‘She tried them on, one after another – the black taffeta with the ...”

“... of love and politics, of metaphysical technique and traditional Gaelic modes, of dan direach and personal destiny – I knew about all this at second-hand; it was part of that store of useful literary information that accumulates at the back of the literary mind like respected, unread books on the bookshelf. But then, in the early ...”

“... he could finish the book, but the revision was more or less complete. Peter Burton and Richard Smith have added chapters on film, the gay scene and rock music, for which Baker had left notes. The result is not just about drag, nor yet about female impersonation, and doesn’t even confine itself to the performing arts. Besides the contemporary pieces, Drag ...”

“... up there with P.G. Wodehouse, in America) is reduced to editorialised sound-bites from a phantom Smith Square manifesto. Two coppers can’t sit down for a swift half without debating the morality of capital punishment. (‘I happen to believe that the death penalty does deter, so what I’m saying is that I’m willing for innocent people to take a greater ...”

“... But prior to that he was in London and he was a prime mover in the Group, he and Edward Lucie-Smith. We attacked them all the time. They were enemies. A lot was going on that we were in opposition to: there was the Group; there was pop poetry; there was the Liverpool Scene. And when Lucie-Smith, arch-organiser of the ...”

“... After Dodds’s death in 1979, Stallworthy was approached again – this time by the OUP’s Dan Davin, another of MacNeice’s friends, and Dodds’s successor as literary executor. ‘Having by then exchanged a publisher’s office for a professor’s, I accepted and, with Dodds’s ghostly presence at my elbow, went back to his editions of the ...”

“... resounded to the cannonades of the Battle of the Books between the Ancients and Moderns, and, as Dan Edelstein has recently shown in The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (2010), the most cited authors in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie were not – as one might imagine of such a daringly modish compilation – the moderns, but Pliny, Ptolemy and ...”

“... who can be relied on to take the most permissive position of anyone in the room.’ Wesley Smith, author of The Culture of Death, offers a more sinister vision of the ethics business, depicting bioethicists as a self-appointed corps of elite liberals plotting to take control of the American medical and judicial systems. Critical essays and editorials ...”

“... Permira wants to acquire HMV. Hundreds of millions of borrowed pounds are flying around. WH Smith wonders whether to de-diversify and go back, wholeheartedly, into books. Meanwhile the high-street supermarkets are skimming the cream with bookstands offering bestsellers and Richard & Judy selections at bargain basement prices. And there is agitated, and ...”

“... but it does look very good. The second room is Gallery 12 nearby, diagonally traversed by Dan Flavin’s 1968 piece, knee high and fifty-odd feet long, coolly dazzling and hotly blazing, An Artificial Barrier of Blue, Red and Blue Fluorescent Light (to Flavin Starbuck Judd), and with word pieces by Lawrence Weiner on two of the walls. The ghostly ...”

“... free to live as he likes as far as society will let him; secondly, that other people besides Angel Dan Davies enjoy poetry, jazz and sex; and thirdly that, appalling as it would be to have Itchy Dave Gelden coming in one’s door ‘fidgeting and scratching his crotch’ (‘Hi, what’s cookin’? Are we gonna blow some poetry, maybe?’), he would probably ...”