“... wishes: there is no Stalinist collectivisation in Nicaragua. A third is the nationalistic brio and David-versus-Goliath bravado of their resistance to the old enemy from the North. All three qualities shine from Cabezas’s book, a personal testimony which accurately mirrors the less articulate attitudes of many of his ...”

“... that absence of the affliction tends to occur among those of limited talent. In other words, as David Belasco once put it, ‘I wouldn’t give a nickel for an actor who wasn’t nervous.’ This sensible conclusion comes as the coda to a cadenza of psychological speculation. And this is characteristic of the book: chapters are apt to conclude ...”

“... the Tolpuddle Martyrs in a revamped Tyneham), Mike Leigh (via Nuts in May), Nigel Coates, even David Mellor. The piquant list of names should convey something of the flavour of Wright’s book, and also the flavour of Purbeck as he understands its role in 20th-century English culture. Wright’s reminder of how muddled is the broadly ...”

“... like to admit it, by The Way Things Go (1987), a 30-minute film by the artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Their creation is an example of a Rube Goldberg machine (named after the cartoonist) in which an unlikely number of devices are linked together to create a domino effect – in its original sense the name refers to a machine designed to perform a ...”

“... by sea and land. As the multiple volumes of The History of Cartography, edited by J.B. Harley and David Woodward, have shown in painstaking detail, the history of maps – their creation, use and abuse – is the history of a whole series of human efforts to comprehend and organise the physical and social worlds. Monmonier, who is the editor of the ...”

“... seem to be hoping for a bequest. Wes Anderson has said he was thinking of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich when he made the movie, and while some of the hotel scenes were shot in an old department store, many of them were done with a miniature. This concentration on art and confection sometimes makes you feel you are watching a film made inside a ...”

“... Picabia a particular way of layered picturing, which was soon appropriated by the Americans David Salle and Julian Schnabel. At its best this hallucinatory mélange suggests not a dream space so much as a media overload, a kind of Surrealism without an unconscious in which the subject, no longer home, is dispersed among images in the world at large. At ...”

“... trafficking in what should not be sold, especially when it doesn’t sell? A thought triggered by David Willetts’s amiable description of the publications a distinguished scholar might bring to the RAE as ‘a good back catalogue’. Austin and Wittgenstein had plenty of thoughts, and a huge influence on philosophy, but at the time of their death almost no ...”

“... masterplan: he is paid £250,000 a week. (Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that, as David Conn has been jaw-droppingly reporting in the Guardian. Tevez’s ‘economic rights’ apparently belong to an overseas investment company whose ultimate ownership is opaque, and is being disputed in court by post-Soviet oligarchs.) What you get for your ...”

“... the one and legally to the other. It was in February that the current crisis was prefigured, when David Cameron in Parliament spoke damagingly about the Supreme Court’s decision that some sex offenders ought to be able in the course of time to ask to be removed from the register, calling it ‘completely offensive’ and contrary to common sense; an attack ...”

“... side in the European Cup is resounding proof of the theorem that football’s a funny game. As David Cameron consoled Merkel with a hug after they watched the penalty shootout at the G8 summit, it might have been a good time to start remembering about Yulia ...”

“... so when you arrive at Fra Angelico’s sweetly decorative manuscript illustration of King David you notice that the gesture of the hand must be the result of someone’s careful observation of what a bent wrist and separated fingers can be made to say and how a foot can be made to rest firmly on the ground. It is dated c.1430 – one can imagine a ...”

“... of the country, £7.45). The company is no doubt pleased to recognise itself in the image of what David Cameron described a year ago as ‘socially responsible’ capitalism, and its sales have bucked the recession – turnover and profits increased by 15 per cent in 2011. But using eco-friendly packaging and donating unused food to the homeless is one ...”

“... for them, but the cheering does drown out quite a lot of other noises. ‘Viewers may ask,’ David Denby says in his very good review of this film in the New Yorker, ‘why it’s supposed to be better that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people in Harlem were destroyed by black gangsters rather than by Italians.’ And along the same lines we may suspect ...”

“... only a couple of weeks ago and giving entirely good reasons why Gordon Brown was on top and David Cameron on the ropes now look faintly embarrassing. But at the beginning of October Brown was on top and no one can be faulted for failing to see his impending humiliation. Nor could they have predicted that the abandonment of a premature general election ...”