“... like the only life left on the earth, all other plants having sent their sap below. Caspar David Friedrich’s Winter Landscape (1811), a version of which is currently on display at the Towner Gallery (until 22 January), shows a snowy post-sunset scene with a group of pine trees in the foreground, and the dark form of a distant cathedral just visible ...”

“... the time of writing, the erstwhile Trump-basher Mitt Romney and the classified document leaker David Petraeus were also under consideration for cabinet posts.) I have trouble drumming up fear in my heart for the likes of Kushner, Bannon, Palin or even Bolton, a devil we know from the Bush administration whose bark as ambassador to the United Nations was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were remarkable, the adult cast a dream, and they have heart and wit on their side. Produced by David Heyman, who went on with Rosie Alison to make the hit Paddington movies, they raised the bar for live-action family entertainment. But they are big-budget motion pictures: tap them and they ring like money. Great children’s fiction isn’t slick; the film ...”

“... front.) The magazine campaigned for the end of Israeli military rule, which with the support of David Ben-Gurion and his party Mapai (later the Labour Party), lasted for 18 years until 1966; it reported on Israeli military actions against Palestinian civilians, including the Qibya massacre in 1953 and the Kfar Qassem massacre in 1956; it published stories ...”

“... readers who enjoy a long book, but no one wants a big book as such. When in the 1960s the artist David Nash bought a chapel in Blaenau Ffestiniog, at the time the cheapest place in Britain to buy property, he befriended Phyllis Playter, who had lived there with John Cowper Powys. Her attempts to get Nash to read A Glastonbury Romance culminated in her taking ...”

“... week – Bratby finished his studies at the Royal College of Art and, thanks to a famous essay by David Sylvester in Encounter, found himself at the head of a movement. ‘Everything but the kitchen sink? The kitchen sink too,’ Sylvester wrote to describe the work of Bratby and others – Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch, Jack Smith – who were busy ...”

“... to Hades – a detail I learned not from Briggs’s notes, but from an account of the poem by David Trotter.No doubt conscious of the fact that Paris has been reissued several times and failed to gain a wider readership, the new edition arrives with reinforcements. The Briggs commentary comes in at about three times the length of the poem ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... them, that potatoes were not sufficient fare. In an article in the current Tatler, Mrs Elizabeth David laments that Salaman did not include recipes: in fact, he includes several. This is one, for the soup served in Epping Workhouse in the last years of the 18th century: ‘4 lbs pickled pork, 6 stones of shins and legs, 6 lbs of skibling (meat waste), 28 lbs ...”