“... to the distant time when I read a book a day. They begin with Lloyd George and the Generals by David Woodward,* a professor at Marshall University, which is somewhere in the New World. The difficult relations between Lloyd George, when prime minister, and the British generals from Haig onwards during the First World War have been a topic of long ...”

“... our predecessors sometimes described as the world we have lost. His is not the first reprint, and David Hey has written a whole monograph about the work. It consists almost entirely of a kind of biographical free association on the part of a man with a marvellous memory standing in Myddle church and contemplating the pews. Each pew was then, of ...”

“... or ‘formal’. Yet our culture encourages us also to find them irritating or infantile. F.C. Bartlett in his book Remembering tells how a Swazi woman, asked in court to describe how she got a knock on the head, began with an account of how she got up that day, whom she met, and so on. When the magistrate interrupted to explain that all he cared ...”

“... The only book about Albania I had read before this one was Edith Durham’s deadpan account of her travels there before the First World War. It is called In High Albania and describes how she had to become an honorary man in order to get around – not among the Muslims, as you might think, but among the Catholic tribes of the north, whose favourite Sunday pastime was shooting members of families with whom they were at blood feud ...”

“... so-called satirists of That Was the Week That Was, a fashionable programme that made a hero out of David Frost. Deedes was at a loss to blunt so vigorous and novel an attack. He was also present at the midnight meeting called to question ‘Jolly Jack’ Profumo about his private life. Profumo lied like a trooper. Martin Redmayne, who was without doubt the ...”

“... steel make such concerted use of the brilliant light effects inherent in its surface. Only David Smith has pursued them as diligently as Ray. The two men share a commitment to contingency as well as a medium: not just steel (itself an alloy of iron), but stainless steel in particular, another alloy, first produced in the early 20th century by adding ...”

“... know them. Among those most delighted by this episode have been Niall Ferguson, Steven Pinker, David Deutsch and Douglas Murray: weirdly few non-white non-men. I recommend that, on their next visit to Portland, these people spend some time in a dog park or ...”

“... his 1981 painting The Irony of the Negro Policeman; in a recent interview in the Marshall Project, David Simon, the creator of The Wire, noted that black police officers in Baltimore are sometimes more brutal than white officers, as if their skin colour makes them immune to racism against poor blacks. A vivid indication of how far – or how low – we’ve ...”

“... with moss growing on their tongues. The former warden John Davis tells a story about the historian David Cox, who, as an undergraduate, climbed onto the Codrington Library and stole the weather vane from the Christopher Wren sundial. When he was elected a fellow, he climbed back up and replaced it. Nobody, as far as he could tell, had noticed its absence.The ...”

“... of reach for those who need it most urgently, but cannot pay for a lawyer. He and his successors (David Gauke is the fourth justice secretary in three years) failed to resist the cuts that by 2020 will have reduced the Ministry of Justice’s budget by 40 per cent in a decade, and have already caused it to lose many of its senior and most competent civil ...”

“... main London dealer and worked with both Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. Brausen asked the young David Sylvester to write something for the catalogue. His response remains acute: Richier, he declared, asks ‘not only how much damage the human body can endure and still remain human, but also how far the human body can be twisted into the shape of sub-human ...”

“... in the name). And what could be more symbolic of the new ‘centrism’ than the fresh-faced David Cameron’s bouncing in on it? Who has forgotten the sight of both parties – Labour and Conservatives – rising to their feet to applaud Tony Blair after his last PMQs in 2007?The question in 2019, then, is not whether a ‘centre’ exists but whether ...”

“... genre painting, rather than the austere classical models emulated by contemporaries such as David or Ingres. In his crowd paintings Boilly subjects the world of early 19th-century Paris to meticulous scrutiny. An old man lights another’s pipe from his own. A drunk pisses against a wall. Dogs bark and children gape. A pair of hands grip the reins of a ...”

“... was dank. He said he was never lonely because of Choupette and that he was reading the philosopher David Hume. I mentioned the efforts of James Boswell to convert Hume to Christianity on his deathbed, and Lagerfeld said it was always possible to be someone else. Hundreds of bottles of Moët stood on bars in the Grand Palais and rows of filled glasses went ...”

“... sense that the material is being stretched. His first, The Horned Man (2002), a campus novel as David Lynch might have conceived it, was rightly praised: it charted a professor’s descent through paranoia into outright mania in a way that was neat, sharp, witty and intelligent. But it gave the sense of being a brilliant writing-school exercise, rather than ...”