“... SDP will die before next time; there seem to be quite enough parties without it. I suppose that Dr David Owen now regrets going over to the SDP. If he had remained in the Labour Party he would now be its leader. The Liberals put on a spirited performance to as little effect as ever. The Labour Party Conference was overshadowed by the question of who was to ...”

“... of lovers in the Islamic haadith, the Heroides of Ovid and the western courtly romances, and David Swale (all too briefly) discusses the limitations of D.H. Lawrence when read in the light of the German Bildungsroman, with its freedom and spiritual adventurousness which is at the same time related to the sense of a given community: these, however, are ...”

“... Their shared psychology is one of super-power self-pity. Rambo sees the United States as David to the Vietnamese Goliath. By slight contrast, the Committee for the Free World views America, in Nixon’s famous, grizzling phrase, as ‘a pitiful, helpless giant’. Never in history can any group of well-connected, well-heeled, well-advertised ...”

“... Politics are three-quarters drudgery, so it takes a special ingredient to enliven the diary of a politician. Harold Nicolson and Chips Channon wrote splendid diaries because they were not so much politicians as sublime social columnists who happened to sit in the House of Commons. Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle were heavyweights and professionals, and the eternal grind of committee life is reflected in their accounts ...”

“... elaborate structures of thought is likely to be construed as an attack on thought itself. David Lodge, accustomed to having it both ways in such matters, describes the typical British objector as Hopkins described Browning: as ‘a man jumping up with his mouth full of bread and cheese shouting that he will stand no damned nonsense.’ Donoghue is too ...”

“... Within days of his death, he and his poetry were appropriated for public use. The young pacifist David Garnett spoke bitterly of how Eddie Marsh exploited Rupert’s image in the 1918 Memoir: We like our boys to wear their hair rather long – to dabble in Socialism, to dabble in ‘decadence’ ... to fancy they really care about ethics – but all the ...”

“... un-compelling. It’s not simply that the characters are one-dimensional; the characters in David Lodge’s campus novels may be one-dimensional but they are invested with buoyancy and a sense of inner propulsion. Moo, on the other hand, reads as though it had been plotted on a chart. The oddity is that one feels that Smiley could, if she wanted ...”

“... see, of our plans for the evening and the rest of the season. And of the impending publication of David Gower’s autobiography.* This had been ghosted by Martin Johnson, a man who, since he began following Leicestershire for the Leicester Mercury back in 1973, two years before Gower’s first-class career began there, had known him better than most. The ...”

“... narrative that his whole story (however loony) makes a much better read than the sober, earnest David Attenborough-style version. Take ‘brachiation’, for example – the ability that some monkeys acquired about 15 million years ago to swing from branch to branch by their arms. In just five pages Young persuades us not only that this must have been a ...”

“... well as his view of laughter as an aid to sociability; so too did Hutcheson’s pupil Adam Smith. David Hume often resorted to ridicule to undermine hypocrisy or superstition, even if he doubted its capacity to settle controversial questions, arguing that mockery was as likely to distort as to reveal the truth. Some of Hume’s philosophical adversaries, such ...”

“... and his family spent Thanksgiving at the Nantucket home of Carlyle’s co-founder, the billionaire David Rubenstein. When the US government spends trillions of dollars, somebody somewhere is in for a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ruling. This happened recently in a case brought against the British government by the Tory MP David Davis and Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson. They challenged the government’s blanket power to retain communications metadata, including emails, phone and internet activity, and the lawfulness of the police and other agencies being able to authorise ...”

“... desire and deserve. Something else has also become apparent. Between 2010 and 2016, it seemed that David Cameron and George Osborne had been as successful as Salisbury, Baldwin and Thatcher before them in setting the terms of political debate: it was relentlessly argued that irresponsible public spending had caused the financial crash, and that only a ...”

“... 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 ...”