“... an isolated Gaza, bits and pieces of the West Bank and an isolated east Jerusalem. Oslo and Camp David repackaged this basic idea. Sharon is just less subtle than Rabin, Peres and Barak. The strategic thinking underlying disengagement has been spelled out by one of Sharon’s advisers, Arnon Soffer of Haifa University. ‘When 2.5 million people live in a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... off on the decision to refer a case to the Court of Appeal. Among the first commissioners were David Jessel, who presented the TV series Trial and Error, whose investigations had helped overturn numerous cases, and the forensic psychiatrist James MacKeith, who provided expert evidence for the defence for the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six. Miscarriages ...”

“... themselves. In his essay for the exhibition catalogue, the curator of the Paris show, David Dupuis, argues that the power of motifs such as the kené emerges from deep communal immersion in the ayahuasca state: they are keys or ciphers that ‘enchant’ by unlocking a shared experience. They are ‘devices for making us see rather than images ...”

“... said they were about to present a ‘take it or leave it’ deal. The director of Mossad, David Barnea, travelled back to Doha. He said Israel was ready to withdraw from the so-called Philadelphi corridor (along Gaza’s southern border) in a potential deal. But hours later, Netanyahu gave a televised address in which he said that Israel must occupy ...”

“... concert, where she meets a porn star called Joel: a man with a chest ‘like Michelangelo’s David’ and ‘a touch of what my mother would call “the criminal element”’. He becomes Mimi’s next obsession. She goes to work for him, answering letters from fans who ‘use the name Donald for mailing and introduction but prefer to be called ...”

“... having illegally thrown them out decades ago. In 2010, during the very last days of New Labour, David Miliband declared a Chagos MPA – at the time the world’s largest. The proportion of the oceans which was highly protected went from less than 1 per cent to 1.5 per cent overnight, and local ecosystems began to recover. Clover played a significant ...”

“... David Attenborough​ was born in 1926, the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Elizabeth II. He began hosting Zoo Quest on BBC television in 1954; not quite seventy years later, his latest series, Wild Isles, has just finished airing (it’s still available on iPlayer, or Amazon Prime for those outside the UK ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... beat us with, and pursues the possibility that their weaknesses might be the obverse of our own. David Nettler, the language expert who falls into Oitarian thought patterns, gives a long account of what it is like to enter that alien ‘mindscape’: Somehow the senses – the body – seemed to grow dim, so that it was an inert mechanism, like a corpse ...”

“... drug habit; Shane McGowan falls apart under the influence of amphetamines and alcohol; David Crosby and Stephen Stills are ‘too coked-up all the time’ to keep their band together; and – playing in front of a ‘zombie’ audience – the New York Dolls announce their desire to be ‘the tackiest boys in New York’ and no one, but no one, is ...”

“... from a devout Christian congregation a hundred years ago if they had been addressed by Bishop David Jenkins. Under some conditions rationality and common sense are indistinguishable from blasphemy. This simply will not do. There can be no no-go areas for historians. Our job is not only to tell people what happened, but to try to explain why. Betroffenheit ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”