“... not good, it’s good.’ No one is immune to a degree of corniness when it comes to Cannes. David Lynch’s Cannes Diary, a ten-part series of short missives documenting his experience as jury president in 2002, is primarily a vehicle for him to indulge his love of café au lait, pain au chocolat, baguette avec fromage and vin rouge. He praises the ...”

“... support from celebrities, among them Rowan Williams, Emma Thompson, Grayson Perry, Noam Chomsky, David Byrne, David King (the former chief scientific adviser to the government) and Thunberg.Less well known is their following among lawyers, farmers (including livestock farmers), medics (last year the Lancet called for ...”

“... Naples; and a decade since the first Aids fiction started to show up: Robert Ferro’s Second Son, David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, Allen Barnett’s beautiful The Body and Its Dangers. Today, as a result of political pressure as well as recognition of a growing gay readership, gay sections can be found in most bookshop chains, and independent gay ...”

“... his 35 years at Netherne. This led me, some months later, to an office in Lambeth belonging to David O’Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals, and chair of the Adamson Collection Trust. We walked up and down the corridors of the clinic where he worked and looked at the display of patients’ pictures on the walls (these ...”

“... to do.’ Dimbleby adds, by way of rumour, that Major and Hurd regarded the outgoing governor, Sir David Wilson (who was sacked to make way for Patten), ‘as one of the principal advocates of the “appeasement” of China, an approach which they believed could no longer be sustained after the atrocity of Tiananmen Square in June 1989’. But, while he avoids ...”

“... the only one in the region – with a unique provision, a ceiling of 65 seats out of 120 for the winner of any election, no matter the size of their vote at the urns. The Kyrgyz example was to be respected.2 It was the largest of all the post-Soviet republics that produced the most pregnant analysis in Furman’s studies of the ‘Commonwealth of Independent ...”

“... social space by both Sadat’s regime (the Brothers were briefly suppressed for opposing the Camp David agreement) and Mubarak’s. They were able to build a large network of Islamic charitable, educational and cultural associations, as well as hospitals and clinics, giving them a social presence that none of the legal parties could rival. They were also able ...”

“... That said, one strand of this narrative is unashamedly triumphalist and teleological: ‘winner’s history’, giving more space to the Greeks than to the Goths, and to the father of Greek medicine than to Greek root-gatherers. ‘From Hippocrates to Biomedicine’ might be its working title: a world-historical tale of how ‘Western ...”

“... outcasts in this country. Not like me: they are true outcasts.’ In this persecution contest, the winner isn’t predetermined. Who is the real outcast? Oates literally dramatises the contest, which acquires the mesmerising, morbid fascination of a hot-dog eating contest between a human and a grizzly bear. Is the real outcast the professor’s grieving widow ...”

“... of the postwar boom in the OECD zone by Anglo-American economists of the Left – Andrew Glyn, David Gordon and others – and totalised a phase of world history under it. The notion, as always and as he himself concedes, is a retrospective one: treasure discovered after the event. It is amid the rubble of the Landslide that what preceded it appear ...”

“... the fatal tendency of the Conservative governments to which Britain has been subjected since 2010. David Cameron’s declaration in January 2013 that, if the Conservatives won the next election, they would offer a referendum on membership of the EU – which wasn’t a significant concern, never mind a priority, for British voters – is a fine ...”

“... blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention and quiz Blakey under my breath: Do you think I look like a MAN? B. gives me an appraising glance but is non-committal. Then everything lands on our table in a ...”

“... were that it should be used in any way possible – short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the weeks ...”

“... announced a contest to give it a ‘brief, easy to pronounce, striking and unique’ name. The winner was ‘Somerdale’.The moves to Bournville, Haxby Road and Somerdale weren’t mere efficiency and tech upgrades. In its poster announcing the naming contest Fry’s says of the site: ‘there is ample room, not only for factories, wharves and ...”

“... Apprentice. This reptilian figure ran on a ticket brazenly twinning himself with the presidential winner as ‘Bolsodoria’. Poetic justice. In Congress, the bandwagon is likely to roll just as fast, deputies clambering aboard in greed or fear to give the executive, at least to begin with, the majorities it needs. As for military resistance to privatisation ...”