“... Burundi. On the way, I’m stopped at numerous Hutu roadblocks. The barriers are manned mostly by young people with clubs, hammers or machetes. At one, a small boy is holding a nail-studded cudgel with tufts of bloody hair. The smell of putrefying bodies by the roadside is sickening. The starter of my dilapidated car is defective and the militiamen lay down ...”

“... Bon Marché, named after Boucicaut’s Paris store although it was founded by a Londoner called David Lewis. Between 1920 and 1924 it was given an art deco makeover and was regarded as ‘one of the finest examples of modern architecture that Liverpool possesses’. There were also Owen Owen and Lewis’s, which catered for customers from the middle and ...”

“... form. Nor does it take the form of the boredom with self either – that great peerless theme of David Foster Wallace’s in his last book, The Pale King (2011).Q. Does anything happen in these books?A. Yes, but not where you think. Let’s first follow a certain consequence of itemisation to its conclusion. There are feelings and emotions in these volumes ...”

“... party, both started out as ‘terrorists’. Begin was behind the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed nearly a hundred civilians; Shamir planned the 1948 kidnapping and assassination of the UN representative Folke Bernadotte. Yitzhak Rabin, revered among liberal Zionists as a peacemaker, oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of ...”

“... presumably, many straight readers. Perhaps a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise the very different ways in which each country is ...”

“... associated. The purge of 1519, for instance, which has so engrossed Gwyn’s bête noire David Starkey, was ‘a storm in a tea-cup’. The truth, pronounces Gwyn, is that the political world of Wolsey’s ascendancy was ‘not an environment where faction flourished’. It was nevertheless an environment where the Duke of Buckingham got his head ...”

“... Israeli officials, for a man detained as a suspect in the killings of two Palestinians. The man, David Axelrod, is not related to Leon Trotsky. A man with the same name, who is a descendant of Trotsky, was questioned briefly by the police in a case of mistaken identity. The arcane character of this item, which was at the top of that day’s menu, might make ...”

“... The connoisseur of deathbeds, of the fortitude of their occupants, of the composure of the atheist David Hume, the prison visitor who liked to watch executions, and appears to have lacked Johnson’s terror of futurity, was off somewhere on business when his wife stopped living. The journal deals with his five years as the widower formed by that crisis. His ...”

“... aware of the difference between a ‘life of purity’, such as he found exemplified by the poet David Jones when visiting him in a Harrow lodging-house with Stephen Spender, and the ‘many lives of pastiche’. But he is aware of the origin of his woes. From 4 October 1953: ‘My deepest problem. I have changed families and at a terrible cost substituted ...”

“... have appeared on the ethics of social work, nursing and engineering; there are now internships for young philosophers in a variety of institutions (including the US Congress); and a few resourceful PhDs have set up as beeper-equipped ethical consultants. On the other side, there has been a renewal of interest in the fundamental questions about the nature and ...”

“... New Nations, organised by the Parsons-derived sociologist Edward Shils and the political scientist David Apter. Geertz quotes from Shils’s amusingly unself-conscious, Cold War-imperial foundational essay: The categories we employ are the same as the ones we employ in our studies of our own societies, and they postulate the fundamental affinities of all ...”

“... or call what he had ample reason – the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall – to suppose was only the young President’s bluff? The crisis in the Cuban missile crisis ended halfway into the second day – Wednesday 24 October – when a meeting between Kennedy and his advisers was interrupted by a report that six Soviet ships had stopped in mid-ocean rather than ...”

“... January, they have been managed by a new Task Force Europe, led by Johnson’s chief negotiator, David Frost, a burly, acerbic diplomat, one of the few in the Foreign Office who has always loathed the EU. Frost’s conversations with Michel Barnier have become openly bitter and recriminatory, in a way not seen before. Frost is backed up by contemptuous ...”

“... of motherhood and ‘my inexplicable (to him) decision to reproduce’: ‘I said that having a young child around all the time was like having a houseguest who never said anything and never left.’ She pointed out the guest’s childlike characteristics:[It is] smaller than anyone in the family … has a peculiar appearance … and does not understand ...”

“... partly as a result of the fact that newspapers are now largely read by the over-fifties, while young people are far more likely to have gone to university. For a host of reasons (not least that its current leader is a journalist), the Tory Party has effectively become the political arm of the press, while routinely complaining about the cultural influence ...”