“... 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 ...”

“... and may weather the crisis, but in a recent podcast by the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club, David Steel, the reserve manager for the Isle of May, says he fears that a third of the world’s bonxies may already be dead. It’s possible that without constant pressure from skuas, other species like kittiwakes and petrels may have a better breeding ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... identified as the major obstacle in the way of Zionist fulfilment in the late 19th century, and David Ben-Gurion said in December 1947 that ‘there can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 per cent.’ Israel, he warned on the same occasion, would have to deal with this ‘severe’ problem with ‘a new ...”