“... for an explanation. ‘She called out to the country,’ Elton John sang at the funeral. But may it not have been the English Rose’s country which, in the aftermath of loss, ceased being able to call out in a traditional way? If so, a call long responded to – not really ‘down the ages’ but for quite a long time, about a century and a half ...”

“... That effort, failing in Vietnam, produced the news reporter as American hero – Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, Seymour Hersch, Jonathan Schell, Peter Arnett. They reported not only the war the government did not want its citizens to see, but also the government efforts to invent a war for domestic consumption. ‘Part of the Vietnamese Seventh Infantry ...”

“... with the censor. In this struggle, writers portrayed themselves with sly disingenuousness as David confronting Goliath. In reality, most writers believed that they, and not the state, would have the last word. And so it has proved. Ben Jonson’s lines are apposite: Nor do they aught, that use this cruelty Of interdiction, and this rage of burning; But ...”

“... of the military importance of mechanical contraptions that can see where they are going. The late David Marr, whose posthumous book Vision generated an upheaval in the subject, insisted that vision be regarded as an ongoing process of computation, which begins with the optical images formed at the back of each eye and culminates in a spatio-temporal world ...”

“... gave offence: ‘The right management of so nice and ticklish a business, wherein a little slip may spoil all, is not everyone’s talent.’ Just as bad were ‘frothy light discourses’ and ‘misbecoming wit’ about religious matters. In the 1670s and 1680s Locke supervised the education of Anthony Ashley Cooper, who later became the 3rd earl of ...”

“... come to be seen as a period of national healing is an open question. The exit from Afghanistan may have been humiliating, but something of the sort was inevitable in a war that had long become futile. Although Biden’s Build Back Better social and infrastructure bill has been trimmed from $3.5 trillion to $2.2 trillion, it represents a larger expansion of ...”

“... exchanges with writers and artists from the Egyptian-French Joyce Mansour to the African American David Hammons. The exhibition as a whole, too, is the result of multiple meetings with many contributors: a collective research project reminiscent of early Surrealist enquêtes into the nature of dreams and desires.The curators chart three paths through the ...”

“... excitedly as he reads – as he always used to. A still from Tacita Dean’s film portrait of David Hockney (2016) Dean clearly has an affinity with old men. Her exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was full of them. She visits the elderly Michael Hamburger at his Suffolk farmhouse with her movie camera, zooming in on the wonky doorways, the ...”

“... Almost five years ago the Cape Town publishing company David Philip brought out Way Up Way Out, a novel by Harold Strachan. Some time later I was sent a copy of the book by a friend of Strachan’s in KwaZulu-Natal, where the author himself has lived much of his life. His name on the cover meant nothing to me – though if I had been more quick-witted I might have connected it to his second trial and period of imprisonment during the apartheid years ...”

“... English was no good: ‘His poems written in pure English . . . seldom rise above mediocrity,’ David Irving wrote in 1800, in his influential Lives of Scottish Authors. The prevailing view of Fergusson’s English work is well summarised by Susan Manning, in the best essay in Crawford’s volume, as ‘nugatory apprenticework’. Her view is that ‘our ...”

“... summer 2003. Almost half of them died, and 19 women died in childbirth at checkpoints. Such scenes may now be avoided, but even under optimal circumstances – and it remains to be seen how comprehensive the withdrawal will actually be – there are vast obstacles facing the Palestinians. The most recent World Bank assessment of the Palestinian economy, for ...”

“... an innate responsiveness to the feelings and needs of others. ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed,’ Smith wrote in the opening lines of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from ...”

“... of the Riace bronzes now housed in Reggio di Calabria, which are described by the present curator David Ekserdjian, nem con, as ‘among the most stupendous works of art in existence’. Such ballon is achieved through the cire perdue or lost wax technique. This involves making a solid model, usually of wax or wax-finished but sometimes of stone or ...”

“... Dover, but the bypasses were on the way by 28 June 1973, when the conservative MP for Canterbury, David Crouch, told the House of Commons that he was merely asking that the A2 be raised to ‘the standard obtaining in Europe’. Crouch quoted a report showing that freight through Dover had increased by 30 per cent less than a month after Britain joined the ...”

“... herself in her art. (Male painters might project aspects of themselves onto their depictions of David, but couldn’t do the same with their Judiths and Lucretias.) In her allegorical works, Artemisia brought artist and subject together by reifying the female personifications used in academic painting to represent abstract qualities and ideals. With superb ...”