“... resort, watching a young couple having sex. In a set-piece inversion of the opening scene of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, it is in this case the morally dubious old goat who watches from the dark as his beloved young Zinka (a ballet dancer turned yoga teacher whom he has only recently met) is clumsily ravished by her boyfriend Niko. It is just the first ...”

“... Inquiry by Sir Kevin Tebbitt exposed as lies Tony Blair’s claims about his own role in the David Kelly affair; Blair staggered on in office for another four years. Bill Clinton survived the unmasking of his perjurious deposition in the Paula Jones case and on-camera lies about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. And so it goes on. Whatever, as Blair ...”

“... marker-penned slogans, or doodles, or quotes from Goethe; a sinister ballpoint-pen portrait of David Cameron and cards written by solicitors Birnberg Peirce explaining that you don’t need to give your name if searched. The walls are a sort of slogan competition, in the manner of a JCR suggestion book or a library toilet wall: which ones will last? In the ...”

“... and turned a scholar into a suppressor of evidence. I suggested the problem was one mentioned by David Hackett Fischer, that history is what the evidence says it is. If the evidence is fragmentary, misleading or missing, then the history is just going to be wrong, or at best incomplete. No, no, no. That was alright as far as it went. But Spender-Lehmann were ...”

“... on this premeditated and systematic degradation of the humanity of an entire population, David Cameron characterised the Gaza Strip as a ‘prison camp’ and – for once – did not neuter this assessment by subordinating his criticism to proclamations about the jailers’ right of self-defence against their inmates. It’s often claimed that ...”

“... the dulling effect of habit. In Writing against Time, drawing on the work of the neuroscientist David Eagleman, Clune looks at the way ordinary experiences are affected by repetition. When we first perceive something, time seems to slow: ‘the moment of perception swells’ and ‘the “fraction of time” expands.’ But the effect fades after the first ...”

“... with it, as he suggests in the account of a primal scene he gave in an interview with David Sylvester: Childhood’s important to me, and it’s when I first came into contact with art. This happened when I was around four or five. One of the greatest pleasures I remember is looking at a cereal box. It’s a kind of sexual experience at that age ...”

“... of European or American Muslims and benefit only the West seems to escape their attention. David Cameron and other Western leaders insist, as they do after every outrage, that the problem is radicalised Islam and therefore the responsibility lies within the religion. (Why was Catholicism never blamed for the IRA offensives?) The real problem is not a ...”

“... and prison or torture. It is the reason the UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, has defended the right to communicate anonymously on the internet, and that Germany has actually legislated to protect the use of anonymity and pseudonymity on social media. Barendt advances two particular arguments against the protection of ...”

“... in the Rotherham 12 case, Lord Justice Leveson, at the Court of Appeal, quashed the conviction of David Sellu, a colorectal surgeon with an exemplary record stretching back more than thirty years. In 2013 he had been convicted of gross negligent manslaughter, blamed for the delay in operating on a patient with a perforated bowel who died of sepsis a day ...”

“... Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in English never exactly sold), and the ...”

“... not to invite a climate change denier to speak? ‘I hope it is just a first step actually,’ David Davis said, ‘in a programme to bring free speech back to Britain.’ Many of us who work in universities are familiar with these arguments. We are told that the greatest threat to speaking freely is radical left culture warriors who have the power to ...”

“... and friend. There are at least two reasons for this. The story has often been told, notably by David Cannadine, of how the long agricultural depression broke the power of the British aristocracy, but it also drove tenant famers and labourers off the land and into the cities and suburbs; a million or more had emigrated by 1914. As a legacy of this flight ...”

“... she called it. The English language isn’t keen on the ineffable – in his book on translation David Bellos memorably says that ‘everything is effable’ – but it does recognise mystery when it has to, and it once allowed us, Diski says, ‘a neat phrase’ for ‘the mist in our minds’: ‘I know not what.’ The phrase ‘works fine in ...”

“... him. We warm to his characters as little as they warm to one another. He revels in their flaws (David, in The Forgiven, whose accidental but culpable killing of a young Arab drives the plot, is thrillingly odious) and keeps them at a distance. Even the underdogs are too devious and grasping to be likeable. They know to be pak-wan, that is to flatter their ...”