“... 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 ...”

“... etching by Linda Karshan beside a drawing of a cigarette (‘This is not a cigarette’) by David Hockney, which not being by a woman, isn’t part of the official collection. The best galleries are the ones you can live and work ...”

“... In​ the spring of 1972, the poet Bernadette Mayer began to keep a journal for her analyst, David Rubinfine, whose patients included Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, and who was notorious for having married another patient, Elaine May, a decade earlier. Mayer was 27. In the journal – there were two, in fact; Rubinfine read one while she wrote in the other – she attempted to record her states of consciousness ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... disasters, Benedict Cumberbatch as Smiley’s diligent gofer, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, David Dencik, Ciarán Hinds as high-ups in British intelligence, all candidates for the ultimately declared position of mole – and the director’s elegant hand is everywhere. Tomas Alfredson is best known for his bleak vampire movie Let the Right One In, and ...”

“... a put-upon bear-leader struggling to get his charge to learn more and drink less, the whole truth. David Stevenson and William Sandys, tutors to Lewisham and Basset, emerge as significant characters with important contacts and interests of their own. Piranesi dedicated a print to Sandys while Stevenson is depicted with Lewisham among the crowd of cognoscenti ...”

“... In July last year, two months after assuming his duties as minister for universities and science, David Willetts granted university status to BPP University College of Professional Studies, making it only the second private institution in England, after the University of Buckingham, to be given the power to award degrees ...”

“... not rude over here,’ Tom says, tentatively.) Lambert Le Roux, the Murdochian press tycoon in David Hare and Howard Brenton’s Pravda, was, like Logan, a sweary, hard-charging thug. Murdoch himself isn’t like that: he’s much more feline. The actor who catches this side of him is Simon McBurney in The Loudest Voice in the Room, the dramatisation of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... other in the complement of pages, page order, colour, and occasionally the wording’ – so says David Bindman in his introduction to William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books (Thames and Hudson, 480 pp., £39.95, 30 October, 0 500 51014 8). Obviously not many such books could be printed, which accounts for their extreme rarity, but Blake thought his ...”