“... topos of visionary architecture runs back at least to the 1960s), and its scheme is very sci-fi. The ‘Millennium Tower’, a diamond-gridded cone of 170 storeys set two kilometres out in Tokyo Bay, recalls, all at once, the Eiffel Tower, the utopian projects of Russian Constructivism, the dark Deco city of Metropolis and the gigantic geodesic dome that ...”

“... were not strictly personal property. In his essay on Warsaw apartments in the 1950s and 1960s, David Crowley quotes Czeslaw Milosz’s remark that ‘to protect his position and his apartment (which he has by the grace of the state), the intellectual is prepared to make any sacrifice or compromise; for the value of privacy in a society that affords little ...”

“... their belief that their main job is to protect the settlers, not the population under occupation. David Shulman, a distinguished academic, peace activist and a member of Ta’ayush, an organisation of Israeli Palestinians and Jews promoting coexistence, wrote about the hilltop youth in his recent book Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in charitable work in the East End. The couple had six children. In February 1910 their son David died, aged five, from diphtheria. Eight days later, MacDonald’s mother died (he had no contact with his father). Then, in September 1911, Margaret died of blood poisoning. Even in the 1930s MacDonald still imagined himself walking along, ‘holding the ...”

“... The most enthusiastic moment came when David Cameron promised to end poverty and pronounced the Tories the real party of the poor. The Conservatives have, of course, always thought themselves the real party of the poor but this time the claim was accompanied by some genuine rhetoric about inequality which they may come to regret ...”

“... democratic state’, and undertake to serve in the army or a civilian alternative. Its sponsor is David Rotem of Israel Is Our Home, who also happens to be chairman of the Knesset law committee. A declaration of loyalty to the state and its laws is reasonable. But loyalty to the Zionist state? Zionism is an ideology, and in a democratic state the ruling ...”

“... the grain follows the form as contours follow the slope of a hill – and led to analyses such as David Sylvester’s of the 1945-46 Reclining Figure: ‘the sacrificed and resurrected god of a fertility rite … at once skeletal and alive, prone in burial and flowering into new life’. The carvings in this room provide a formidable example of sustained ...”

“... directed by Niels Arden Oplev; an American version is apparently in the works, to be made by David Fincher. There are some good performances here, especially by Noomi Rapace as the glamorously mean and punky Lisbeth Salander, but the real interest of the film in relation to The Ghost Writer is in how written it feels. The weight of a crowded novel is ...”

“... UKIP MEPs to Brussels.) If we strip out those 59 seats from the 2010 Parliament, we are left with David Cameron’s Tories having an outright majority, and no need for coalition government. If we move backwards through history, it’s unusual for the Scottish electorate to be such a decisive shaping force for the composition of Parliament: Thatcher would have ...”

“... In July, David Freud, the Conservative peer in charge of changes to the benefit system, wondered aloud in the Lords whether the boom in food banks was ‘supply-led’ or ‘demand-led’. Two years ago, 70,000 people used food banks and now 347,000 do. ‘What is a supply-led food bank?’ another peer wanted to know ...”

“... well as the menu. An appearance of effortless sophistication is the middle-class ideal. Elizabeth David not only brightened postwar Britain with the flavours of the Mediterranean, she wrote in a way that reassured the large number of women and some men who were learning to cook for themselves that there was nothing demeaning about it. Her books are ...”

“... areas of colour, enlivened by tiny touches of chromatic variation – an excuse for pure painting. David Sylvester said of Soutine’s landscapes that the motif is ‘secondary to the forces it has unleashed’, and the same holds true for the portraits. Flickers of colour only half follow the folds of the white uniform in The Little Pastry Cook ...”

“... 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 ...”