“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... over a rock with a village population’, to quote the words of one of the dead, Lieutenant David Tinker RN. Perhaps on reflection, and with realistic offers of compensation and, if desired, resettlement, they might accept a lease-back solution to the sovereignty problem. Presumably this would be easier for those who, according to Jean Carr, complained ...”

“... It is often said that the British are obsessively interested in secrecy. It is less often said how deep and peculiar this obsession is, and how much more there is to it than the well-known fact that British authorities are exceptionally secretive. Our interest is in secrecy as much as in secrets: it is the process, the practices and irregularities of keeping and revealing secrets, that concerns us ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the many small groups that filled the square. Movement veterans like the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and Marina Sitrin, the author of a book about horizontal organising methods used in Argentina, conversed with twenty-somethings freshly radicalised by disappointment in the president they helped to elect. Not long after the police massed at the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... believed – as most did – that all species had been created by the Almighty. The Jesuit Père David, who explored China in the 1860s, was propelled by his quest for God’s wonders, and careless of personal hardship. Exploration was by no means confined to rainforests. Conniff is particularly good on the early history of species ‘bagging’ in North ...”

“... Rainbow, Salisbury Cathedral’ from ‘Various Subjects of Landscape’ after John Constable by David Lucas (1837) The uses of adversity are sweet as well as bitter, as the old Duke in Shakespeare almost said, and what is best about Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape is probably as much a result of hard times as what is not so ...”

“... debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David Kalstone wrote, ‘in saying it appeared with that sense of completeness of utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South).’ The book they were talking about was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... brutality. In 2010 two of its officers, Timothy Gorman and Timothy Callahan, tackled 28-year-old David Smith, who was experiencing a mental health crisis, at the downtown YMCA. They pinned him on his stomach and applied ‘prone restraint’: Gorman kneeled on Smith’s upper back for nearly four minutes, causing his death. Or perhaps Chauvin learned it when ...”

“... 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 ...”