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“... David Means​ wrote a novel. David Means wrote a novel! Reading the hype around Hystopia – the new novel, the first novel, so far the only novel by the American writer David Means – you have to wonder how much pressure Means resisted from his publishers to forswear the pleasures of the customary gnomic cipher (American Enchiridion, The Accidental Occidental) and just call the book that: David Means Wrote a Novel: A Novel Written by David Means ...”

“... the reason novelists and short-story writers are often quite distinct breeds). The American writer David Means will have none of this. His highly original stories are coats that have been reversed to show their linings. Rather than lightly hint at an exquisite pattern or organising symbol, he likes to accentuate the pattern, to dash it in the reader’s ...”

“... theories other scholars have advanced about Donatello’s bronze sculpture of a beautiful nude David, Shearman unveils his own interpretation: ‘The meaning of names is important in Renaissance art, and David means beloved.’ Did artists or their patrons really bother much about etymology? A footnote gives only ...”

“... footnotes and parentheses. In certain states of mind – distracted, tired – the sound of words means more than their content; there are reassuring rhythms. I bought Ben Marcus’s first book, The Age of Wire and String, in a remainder shop soon after it was published, without knowing what kind of thing it was. I liked the way it sounded: Certain weather ...”

“... David Thomson​ is best known for a series of surveys of the history of cinema as Olympian in scope as they are in evenness of tone, the most notable being his indispensable Biographical Dictionary of Film from 1975, subsequently updated in a series of editions as the New Biographical Dictionary of Film. His latest book, The Fatal Alliance, is every bit as commanding in its succinct description and analysis of a wide variety of films, good, bad and (mostly) indifferent ...”

“... seemed, had changed, after all. Public ownership was not essential to socialism. It was merely a means to an end, and not a very important means. What mattered was equality, and equality could be achieved in other ways. Bevan dropped out of my pantheon, and Gaitskell took his place. Crosland did not join the ...”

“... start to diverge. The Tories’ failure to get agreement about redrawing electoral boundaries means the national constituency map still favours Labour. It would be possible for Labour to win significantly more seats on fewer votes than its rivals: playing around with the numbers in the predictor grid on the website Electoral Calculus you can have Labour ...”

“... of immediate responsibility for the disaster. His larger purpose is signalled in the title, which means ‘crabwise’, and carries the same metaphorical meanings as in English. This is history as indirection, and on one occasion he spells it out: ‘moving backwards in order to progress’. Grass interweaves the stories of three men whose lives determined ...”

“... for them). That’s the thing about first-past-the-post: the winners get to decide. And that means doubling down on the current system. It is not the case that a Tory government with a small majority won’t be messy too. Commentators are already pointing out that if this is 1992 all over again then David Cameron is ...”

“... all accounts, first thing in the morning) for guidance, reassurance and schemes of revenge. It means that Brown has become dependent on the advice of people who were once entirely dependent on him. This cannot be healthy. Even more striking than Brown’s taste for attaching himself to his former intellectual bag-carriers is the fact that each of his three ...”

“... an urgent call for a ‘critical history of art’, founded on an understanding that ‘the only means of gaining an adequate grasp of old artifacts lies in the dual critique of the ideology which sustained their production and use, and of the current cultural interests that have turned works of art into a highly privileged class of consumer and didactic ...”

“... Conservative centre postion, suspicious of radical change. But nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum means that, in the marketplace of politics, if the big parties fail to meet the demand for stability and moderation, others will rush in to bid for the electorate’s custom and fill the vacant strip in the core of the spectrum. Although the country may have gone ...”

“... tables d’intégrales définies, published in Leyden in 1867 by the wealthy Dutch mathematician David Bierens de Haan. Two years into the atomic age, access to a well-stocked library filled with old, foreign-language books was still required. Hence the need for the 1947 table: although in principle anyone should have been able to compute the integrals, in ...”

“... scatty skutsome creature, who thinks she’s horse. The circle needs to be compass-correct, that means me standing centre while the ringmaster strides around me with string and a hundred stakes one hammered in every two paces, every two paces one hammered in. Then we rig everything around the ringside in old order, the big tent, four king poles, twelve queen ...”

“... Better still to let the clock wind down to 29 March in the hope that no agreement in Parliament means that no deal can be struck. Meanwhile, for Remainers, secure in the knowledge that there is no parliamentary majority for a no-deal exit, the temptation is always there to push for a second referendum in the hope of overturning the original result. Why ...”