“... 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 ...”

“... 2006, and later this year the whole essay will appear in an authorised English version edited by David Pan and Jennifer Rust, complete with an impressive apparatus of supporting essays about this anomaly in Schmitt’s oeuvre.* Without these supplementary materials, Schmitt’s book would be a good deal less interesting. One of the appendices, ‘On the ...”

“... but according to Ebright, ‘Mohammed Atta would have passed those tests without difficulty.’ David Ozonoff of Boston University doesn’t see why they’d bother: ‘Bioterrorism to me is analogous to an autoimmune disease. We did it to the Soviet Union, we bankrupted them in the arms race. Now, al-Qaida is going to bankrupt us on the biodefence ...”

“... them a German style (Gothic), storm clouds and the rising sun, stand for national renewal. Caspar David Friedrich’s symbolic stricken oaks and silent moonrise-watchers address the nation’s soul rather than its politics, but there, too, the search for a way to a German national future is evident.Nationalism and Modernism mix nowhere more strangely than in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of infamous goodies. Meanwhile, FDA criticism will probably earn a few more adherents thanks to David Leverenz’s Manhood and the American Renaissance. It is better than most such books because, for one thing, he is at times a competent if constricted close reader, while being at heart resentful that he is required to be one at all by certain of the works ...”

“... invention of powered flight is so familiar that it’s easy to think we know all about it. David McCullough’s excellent biography The Wright Brothers brings the story back to life with facts that the non-specialist either doesn’t know or has blotted out with a misplaced broad brush. Yeah yeah, we get it: the brothers were provincial tinkerers who ...”

“... died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus ...”

“... in modern eyes may lie in perceptual as well as in cultural embarrassment. A laconic note from David Hockney prefaces Paul Joyce’s conversations with him. It ends: ‘My photographer friends said it wasn’t really photography but painting. I’m not so sure, but I think that’s where I’d like to leave it.’ Whether it is ‘it’ the work or ...”

“... the claws were bared less often. These extracts, chosen by Benson’s splendid biographer, David Newsome, from among the four million words of the diaries Benson left as his memorial, are taken from a period in Benson’s life when he was uncertain and hypersensitive, so the claws are out. It was at the turn of the century, and Benson, having been ...”

“... to wander, our batteries go dead, our hearing-aid ceases to function. I have to say what Professor David Minter is far too sensitive a critic not to know well, often hints but never says outright. Large regions of Faulkner’s novels are inaudible. In the racing sense as well as the literary sense let us have a glance at his form in that alleged masterpiece ...”

“... apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York ...”

“... stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy marching inexorably towards Downing Street. When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him: wasn’t he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things? I remembered him as quite handsome, with the ...”