“... James.7 August, Oxford. To Oxford and the Holywell Music Room where Bodley’s librarian emeritus David Vaisey and I have a conversation about our time at Oxford in the 1950s. David and I were first aware of each other at the scholarship examination in Exeter College hall in January 1954. The hall was bitter cold but both ...”

“... or at least its dedicated mourner. He has written a polemic against John Major’s Government and David Owen, the EU mediator in the remains of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, for their connivance in the ferocious dismantling of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is keen on Major’s New Labour successors, and confident that Tony Blair’s support for the Milosevic ...”

“... lay with those of their contemporaries who tried to continue some form of modern classicism – David Wild, John Winter, David Chipperfield, Tony Fretton, Georgie Wolton (an exceptionally rare woman in this group), the partnership of Alan Colquhoun and John Miller. In the 1970s and 1980s most of these could be found ...”

“... over his life and over his conduct as a leader of the Revolution, and what is soon evident about David Lawday’s spirited and highly readable biography is that he stands Danton in a flattering light and pays insufficient attention to movements in the shadows. ‘The Gentle Giant of Terror’, the subtitle calls him: which suggests, along with revolutionary ...”

“... dog, has written a play, premiering at Quahog, which ‘all the playwrights’ (i.e. Yasmina Reza, David Mamet and me) duly go and see – and rubbish. They had first of all asked if they could use me as a cartoon character to which I graciously agreed (not saying that I felt it was the highlight of my career). It was then they asked if I would voice ...”

“... Fund, estimates the US subsidy at $83 billion a year. Senators Sherrod Brown (Democrat, Ohio) and David Vitter (Republican, Louisiana) have asked Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, to come up with a more authoritative figure. No one to my knowledge has done the equivalent calculation for the countries of continental ...”

“... literature: ‘effects-based operations’ were defined by the former US air force general David Deptula during the First Gulf War as a means of applying the minimum conventional force to achieve the greatest strategic effect. In US government planning, ‘proxy warfare’ is the preserve of wily enemies, Iran and Russia in particular. The US National ...”

“... of sin. Is this ‘artful whiteface mockery of pious racists’? In his new biography of Wheatley, David Waldstreicher encourages us to think so, and to read the lines in a ‘mocking or satirical instead of a beseeching voice’, so that we can hear Wheatley ‘become the organic intellectual of the enslaved’.The poem shows Wheatley working within narrow ...”

“... Her appearances were always lively. Wearing black leather and stilettos, she flirted with David Letterman, telling him that the ‘important lesson’ she learned from her father is ‘balls’: ‘I somehow grew them somewhere along the line.’ Conan O’Brien was a bit shrill for her taste, shrieking about portraits painted in blood and the time ...”

“... Life of an Ordinary Man, the posthumous memoir pieced together by the publisher and journalist David Rosenthal. His source material was a series of interviews Newman recorded with the screenwriter Stewart Stern between 1986 and 1991, along with ‘oral histories’ of Newman by his contemporaries. In her foreword, Newman’s daughter Melissa says he wanted ...”

“... erosion of Britain’s postwar social democratic gains, and the normalisation of what the late David Graeber called ‘the machinery of hopelessness’. For tenants, this manifests itself in the bleak knowledge that Britain is yoked to a form of economic growth from which they are shut out, but also in more personal annoyances: not being allowed to hang ...”

“... and after, with reminiscences by various advertisements for the system, including Kenneth Clarke, David Puttnam and Barry Hines. Listening to their recollections of taking and passing the eleven-plus makes me wonder whether I ever took it at all. I had jumped one or two classes at my primary school so by July 1944 when I left to go to secondary school, I was ...”

“... David Ben-Gurion​ , the founder of the state of Israel, was brooding, explosive, often on the verge of collapse: every obstacle he faced was a ‘catastrophe’. He dabbled in mysticism, consulted fortune-tellers, claimed to see flying saucers, and lived according to his whims. At one point he went on an unannounced holiday from his duties as prime minister to take driving lessons on the French Riviera; on another occasion, he spent a week studying Buddhism in Burma, and tried to persuade his teachers that he’d stumbled on a contradiction in their doctrine no one else had unearthed ...”

“... do. But so also do a collection of people whom I’ve never seen before, and in such numbers that David Hyde Pierce, who is presenting it, is practically elbowed out of the way. These turn out to be the backers who, of course, have every reason to be pleased and indeed one of them duly adjusts my tie. I am then bundled out through a back door and across the ...”

“... Nevertheless the Israelis have been forbearing: they are willing, in accordance with the Camp David arrangements, to consider allowing autonomy to the West Bank Arabs, and are sorry they refuse to take part in the negotiations. The apparent reasonableness of these arguments cannot conceal the fact that they result from a typical transformation of a ...”