“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... personal essays, not far from the work of the so-called ‘ultra-talk’ poets (Albert Goldbarth, David Kirby) whose chatty, digressive work filled many magazines in the 1990s. Perillo told me at a recent reading that her favourite contemporary poet was C.K. Williams, whose famously long-lined, sometimes violent poems were as committed as she is to ...”

“... with the classics of the genre, is off. There is another premise, another genre in question. David Selznick told Wilder that ‘mixing gangsters and comedy wouldn’t work,’ and perhaps even Wilder didn’t know at first how wrong his adviser was. Would the St Valentine’s Day Massacre really play as farce? The opening frames of the film offer an ...”

“... Excitement was aroused by the announcement, last September, of a double discovery: the actual rules, on a cuneiform tablet, of a board game thought to date from 3300 BC, of which only some surviving boards had previously been known, and a living individual from a Jewish community in Cochin who had herself played that very game before she migrated to Israel, and could recall the rules in accordance with which she had then played it ...”

“... Lewis Carroll. (The fact that the latter also represented the indisputable nadir in the career of David Bowie is, for the purposes of this review, neither here nor there.) In the film Dreamchild, the cinematic meditation on the life of the real Alice directed by Gavin Millar and scripted by Dennis Potter, Henson was the obvious choice to supply the puppets ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of language themselves, at least not in public, but leave it to civilian internationalists like Mr David Watt and Mr Silkin. One also senses that the Navy does not itself use the shark-like term ‘hunter-killer’ for its submarines. We have the good fortune to have a silent and professional military establishment. One of Argentina’s many troubles is that ...”

“... with a curious flatness. Perhaps because she was not allied to a studio but to a producer, David O. Selznick. The lore does not accumulate as easily around a freelance. Selznick International brought her from Sweden to America on the Queen Mary in 1939. It was Selznick himself who made the big decision: I’ve got an idea that’s so simple and yet no ...”

“... though I do not know how much attention he has paid to the more recent work of philosophers like David Armstrong and Donald Davidson, who identify mental with neural events. I may add that although the acceptance of physicalism, in one form or another, is widespread among contemporary philosophers, with some notable exceptions, such as that of Karl Popper, I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”