“... a psychopathic hymn.’ The following year, however, at the height of the moral panic surrounding David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the novel (‘BAN THIS CAR CRASH SEX FILM,’ the Daily Mail suggested), he changed his mind again. ‘It has to be a cautionary tale,’ he said during a discussion with Cronenberg at the BFI. ‘If not, it’s a psychopathic ...”

“... Hazan’s book is thick with quotations from Balzac’s novels and stories. The translator, David Fernbach, had to decide how to handle them: translate them himself, or seek out existing versions? Understandably, he adopted the latter course, but in some cases he chooses Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s translations from the late 19th century, which are ...”

“... deal that needed explaining. Some, like the Italian interviewer, have dwelt on the appeal of the David-and-Goliath conflict between the Gauls and the Roman superpower. Or, at least, David and Goliath with a twist: Astérix doesn’t beat brute force by superior cunning and intelligence – he does it thanks to his ...”

“... to have their dreams interpreted. Messiahs turned up roughly once a century. In 1523, it was David Reubeni, a traveller who claimed to be David, son of Solomon, and had some success touring his act around Italy: he left Rome in a flutter of glittering streamers, embroidered with the words of the Ten Commandments in ...”

“... image is trapped inside the prism. No one around you can see it – it’s almost a hallucination. David Hockney, who took up drawing with a modern camera lucida in 1999, described it in Secret Knowledge (2001) as projecting not ‘a real image of the subject, but an illusion of one in the eye’:At first I found the camera lucida very difficult to use ...”

“... clear out of Russia and leave the Russians to fight it out among themselves’. In Britain, David Lloyd George had similar reservations, but his government included a passionate supporter of the intervention, the newly appointed minister of munitions and soon to be secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill.Wilson’s scepticism meant that the ...”

“... liked Germany and negotiated the concordat did not mean, however, that he was a crypto-Nazi. As David Kertzer concludes in his new book, ‘Pope Pius XII was certainly not “Hitler’s Pope” … In many ways, the Nazi regime was anathema to the pope and to virtually all those around him in the Vatican. They were alarmed by the Reich’s efforts to weaken ...”

“... Americans in Paris, Burchett writes of a misunderstanding between the chief American negotiator, David Bruce, and Henry Kissinger, who had just returned from his ‘secret’ visit to Peking. I hear from the best authorities available that there was no problem between the two men. This is confirmed by the fact that, shortly afterwards, Kissinger appointed ...”

“... Archbishop Laud and the University of Oxford is much in Trevor-Roper’s spirit. I greatly enjoyed David S. Katz on the problem, much debated in 17th century England, of what language Adam spoke. After some false starts with Egyptian and ‘the language of Canaan’, Hebrew won the contest: hence the increase in Hebrew studies during the century. Republicans ...”

“... on the next page, does ‘Sanglorians, save! Arms apeal with larms appalling’ (4:7) require ‘Fr. sang’ and ‘Fr. larme’ but not, apparently, ‘Fr. sanglot’? Why, of the allusions, in the first chapter, to the bridges of Paris, originally remarked by J.S. Atherton and repeated ...”

“... chosen to illustrate the book, for example, are instructive. In one of them, Roll is putting David Rockefeller at his ease. In another, he is giving a hearty pep-talk to a sheepish-looking Edward Heath (on his other side Lord Carrington has closed his eyes and appears to be gritting his teeth). In yet another, he is administering a severe ticking-off to ...”

“... sheep, goats and geese’. And then he has some private thoughts about Michelangelo’s David: about ‘those enormous hands, that boxer body, and what Michelangelo’s slightly older contemporary Marlowe called “those parts which men delight to see”, but here pitifully small, soft and drooping – parts to which, of all ...”

“... Black New Yorker in the middle of the 20th century.In the recent DeCarava retrospective at the David Zwirner gallery, Hallway stood out among the rows of silver gelatin prints. At first glance, it appears as a dense mass of what the curator Zoé Whitley called his ‘infinite palette of grey tonalities’, which take on volume in their shadowiness. It ...”

“... successor, known as ‘Privacy Shield’. The Labour deputy leader, Tom Watson, together with David Davis, the Conservative MP who withdrew when he became Brexit minister, challenged the now repealed Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 in the EU court, relying again chiefly on the privacy rights in Article 8 of the Charter. Davis claimed that ...”

“... and men five. The six-year gap that had opened up by 1951 was back to four. Since 2011, under David Cameron and Theresa May, life expectancy has flatlined. The latest figures, published by the Office for National Statistics in September, are for the period 2014-16. Women can now expect to live for 83.06 years and men for 79.40 years. For the first time in ...”