“... at fringe meetings at Tory conferences where the mood could best be described as hostile – yet David Cameron and even George Osborne appear genuinely committed to the project. They see it as a way of boosting business and of demonstrating their credentials as modernisers. They also believe it will help their electoral prospects in the North. The fate of ...”

“... the survivors with machine-gun fire. More than two hundred were killed. The prime minister, David Ben Gurion, instructed Yigal Allon, the operation’s leader, to deport the surviving residents. Another commander, Yitzhak Rabin, issued the order: ‘The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.’ These and other episodes of ...”

“... to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the baby had not caused offence, so was not painted out, with the result that a naked and strangely breasted Dawson is now seen feeding the child. Freud’s American dealer assumed the picture would be unsellable; it was bought by the first ...”

“... entry. He is doing all that he should to ensure that he can make an authorised entry. David Blunkett reacted angrily to this judgment, referring in disparaging terms to lawyers in general and specifically to those who saw in this decision an opportunity to orchestrate a large number of actions for damages against the state. An appeal was ...”

“... game.) They have better players than we do; but it is possible that we are a better team. David Beckham has flown his hairdresser out to Japan, allegedly because Victoria noticed that his mohican was looking scraggly. (As opposed, of course, to completely twuntish.) There is a theory that he is going to try out a whole new hairstyle for the Brazil ...”

“... Baldwin died’. Philip Roth has been led to histories of American racism by Coates’s books. David Brooks credits him for advancing an ‘education for white people’ that evidently began after ‘Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings’. Even USA Today thinks that ‘to have such a voice, in such a moment, is a ray of light.’ Coates ...”

“... be cut. Or a future government could choose to abolish them, as the radical free marketeers of David Lange’s Labour Party did when they came to power in New Zealand in the 1980s. Many British farmers support Brexit. Others fear it would destroy them. The National Farmers Union has come out against, arguing that without subsidies, most British farms would ...”

“... restrictions. She thus enlists Berlin’s ideas in a cause not usually associated with him. David Pears evokes the early days of Oxford analytic philosophy and Berlin’s perceptive involvement with it; Charles Taylor discusses the legacy of Herder to contemporary philosophy, particularly the philosophy of language. I wish there had been more ...”

“... of England that they arrived with were sadly wide of the mark; curious distillations in which David Niven-like aristocrats dispensed fairness and tolerance in a Dickensian landscape. ‘All I knew about England was what I read,’ says Teddy Peiro, who was born in Argentina: ‘I was very fond of the famous detective, Derek Lawson, and his ...”

“... fought around that phrase, and the whole question of quality. And something was won. The Minister, David Mellor, accepted that ‘exceptional circumstances’ could include quality. This he has now spelled out in the Bill. But it still leaves much unanswered. Little is laid down in relation to ensuring diversity. The customary reference to the broadcaster’s ...”

“... have consistently displayed a capacity for division of counsel and confusion of purpose in which David Steel would have felt thoroughly at home at any time. ‘An ill-organised miscellany of view-points’ is how Paul Addison, in The Road to 1945, describes it from 1916 on. Or as Neville Chamberlain wrote in his diary for 19 October 1935, ‘our party is ...”

“... move from the Chairmanship of the ITA to the Chairmanship of the BBC: an event described by David Attenborough as like Rommel taking command of the Eighth Army. The truth of this whole matter may, I suppose, be indefinitely hidden among rival conjectures, for it is evident from Tracey’s account that at least one person who should know how and why ...”

“... not nearly as good a critic as he evidently thinks he is. Compare his essay on Edward Thomas with David Bromwich’s in a recent Raritan, and you’ll see the academic critic is far better. In scholarship, on the rare occasions on which it arises, Grigson is irresponsible. In The Private Art he says that ‘years ago someone spotted that in another of ...”

“... Dickens’s earlier version of the same thing: ‘Neither book is as variegated and inventive as David Copperfield, as independent of materials outside the fiction.’ Such a sweeping summary does not suggest a very rigorous reading of Lawrence or Joyce, or of Dickens for that matter, and Buckley does not have the space to substantiate it. His book is ...”

“... accept her involvement in the crises of her new friends with the amiable unself-consciousness of a David Copperfield. Some episodes seem too neat, too ‘finished’. She meets an Eritrean student named Ibrahim whose brother has recently died in the struggle for independence from Ethiopia. He himself is soon to return to join the fighting. With his friends he ...”