“... pays it into Party funds. ‘Here’s a pound – use it to enforce law and order’ he urges Sir David McNee, of New Scotland Yard, who politely returns it: but Mr Whitelaw, on receipt of a similar command, keeps the money for the Party. A fiver sent to the head of a grammar school to induce him to use improper influence on behalf of Root’s son is put into ...”

“... Venice Commission, set up in 1990 and composed of judges and senior academics, thinks it should. David Dyzenhaus introduced the concept of the legal black hole, ‘a situation in which there is no law’. The exemplary instance of our time is Guantánamo Bay. These black holes are voids carved out by the legal order itself. Dyzenhaus compares them to legal ...”

“... a collection of essays which will be published later in the autumn, Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson are good enough to acknowledge this problem, and even admit that the essays collected in their book are likely to contain large errors. But they haven’t let this stand in their way. The Literary Animal is a founding text in the emerging ...”

“... and monogamy’. Strange they haven’t found the gene for smugness yet. Not to be outdone is David Buss, author of The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating and Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, whose new book, The Dangerous Passion, is about jealousy, and why it’s ‘as necessary as love or sex’. His acknowledgments ...”

“... themes, together with many of the specific examples, are discussed in A Closer Look: Colour by David Bomford and Ashok Roy, published by the National Gallery in 2009, the second edition of a book that first appeared in 2000. Most of the rooms are devoted to a single colour, and in addition to paintings there are specimens of pigments and the materials from ...”

“... the higher earner pays less interest – the low or static earner will always pay more. Cable and David Willetts have made noises about preventing higher earners benefiting in this way, but there is no clarity, and certainly no decision, on what measures might be taken, and it’s pretty clear that any number (whether a minimum number of years during which ...”

“... Upstairs at the V&A exhibition, the layout is that of the digital panopticon. Arty photos – by David Hughes – are projected on the walls all around of the same ugly, theatrical dresses you can see life-size on display, worn by skinny department-store mannequins, with books and lampshades and hedges for faces. The fabrics themselves are digitally panoptic ...”

“... be fighting Nato, not the Pakistan army. Meanwhile the British military commander, General Sir David Richards, echoing McChrystal, talks of training Afghan security forces ‘much more aggressively’ so that Nato can take on a supporting role. Nothing new here. Eupol (the European Union Police Mission in Afghanistan) declared several years ago that its ...”

“... When,​ on his 69th birthday, David Bowie released Blackstar, arguably his best record for 35 or even 40 years, it looked for a moment as if he might be hitting his stride again. His previous album, The Next Day, which came out in January 2013 after ten years of near silence, had a few decent songs on it, but a fair bit of padding too, and for all its surface insistence on the future (‘and the next day and the next and another day’), it looked nostalgically back to the 1970s, from the palimpsest sleeve design, incompletely erasing the cover of Heroes, to the elegiac single ‘Where are we now?’, with its deceptively banal evocation of Bowie’s time in Berlin (‘Had to get the train from Potsdamer Platz ...”

“... responsible, there’s no turning back’), has also said that if he’s found guilty of bribing David Mills – a verdict is promised before the statute of limitations expires later this month, unless Berlusconi can derail the trial – he’ll ‘pull the plug’ on Monti’s ...”

“... benefits to veterans – or, for that matter, to the families of dead soldiers. In January 2005 David Chu, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, told the Wall Street Journal that benefits were becoming ‘hurtful. They are taking away from the nation’s ability to defend itself.’ The US doesn’t make it easy for veterans to ...”

“... fact that he was also a writer. English painters have written more than most. Some, like Blake, David Jones, Mervyn Peake and Michael Ayrton (who did a portrait of Lewis and dust jackets for his late novels), have created literary and visual worlds that overlap. Lewis, despite being a novelist, was more like Sickert or Hogarth, who used words to fight ...”

“... about the time-servers – quite a lot, if he wants to air it, on Richard Holbrooke, Douglas Hurd, David Owen. On the UN, which is less a matter of dishing dirt than asking very basic questions, he is in a trickier position. In March 1999, Nato was in breach of international law and until quite recently, Milosevic was a stickler for international law. But the ...”

“... drawings relating to the Whitechapel Boys: the group of Jewish painters and writers (they included David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, Mark Gertler and Isaac Rosenberg) who met in the library in the early decades of the 20th century. In the space at the top of the old library building is a selection, made by Michael Craig-Martin, of ‘great early buys from the ...”

“... Later the design group Pentagram took on the job of branding Faber (it was they who introduced the ff logo) and cool, neat inventiveness took over. The covers from 2000 to 2008 are much more difficult to pin to individual designers. There is hand lettering, but no letter designer of Wolpe’s calibre; there are riffs on old advertising and very well mannered ...”