“... itself scarcely bothers to vote. So that in a year that saw every kind of insurgency, from David Duke’s racist populism to Jerry Brown’s slightly loopy egghead rebellion, the vast normality of America has reasserted itself. Things are safely back in the control of the handlers, the managers, the big donors and the spin-physicians. Even the ghost I ...”

“... half-crust. (“That bread alone was worth the journey,” they probably remark, just as Elizabeth David says of a trip to an out-of-the-way eatery in France.)’ This provoked disdain and wrath on the Letters page, and a response from Angela in the shape of a postcard from Austin, Texas. On the front was a picture of a violently steaming saucepan. On the back ...”

“... that successive Tory leaders have stuck to it. The 0.7 per cent figure was reached in 2013, on David Cameron’s watch, an achievement regarded with pride. Theresa May, on the eve of her departure from Downing Street, went out of her way to reaffirm the commitment. Even Boris Johnson is standing by it – for now. The promise that DFID will remain a ...”

“... of annotating any Paterian text. The general editors of the new Oxford edition, Lesley Higgins and David Latham, have embarked on the project with bravura: ‘The ten volumes of The Collected Works of Walter Pater are commissioned to serve scholars as the definitive edition for at least as long as the unscholarly 1910 Library Edition has served.’ Volumes III ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... making it the third most expensive work by a living artist, after Jeff Koons’s Rabbit and David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist. The buyer, Vignesh Sundaresan, called it a ‘significant piece of art history’. Sundaresan doesn’t own the copyright to Everydays. All he bought was a non-fungible token (NFT): a collection of data stored using ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who gained 223 council seats. The Lib Dems toppled the Tories in West Oxfordshire, which includes David Cameron’s old seat in Witney (though Witney itself voted Labour), and one of the major threats to a future Tory majority comes from the southern marginals once swept by Cameron’s party. Yet what should draw just as much attention is the performance of ...”

“... one of several umbrellas, is adjusting the noose. Powell’s co-conspirators, George Atzerodt and David Herold, still have their heads free: their expressions – private reckoning, a kind of baffled fear – are legible on their faces. A large man in a white coat and Panama hat is fussing round them, carrying with him the incongruous atmosphere of a summer ...”

“... twice a year. But Trump, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, his Israel adviser, Jason Greenblatt, and David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel (or Israel’s ambassador to the US – I find I’m confused), have given Israelis a free pass to go on imagining the post-conflict future in terms of the present overwhelming power imbalance between Israel and ...”

“... The connectionist approach is different. In 1986, the psychologists James McClelland and David Rumelhart proposed a network that learns verbs by building associative links between stems and their past tense forms. The network is ‘trained’ by repeated exposure to such pairs, without any appeal to rules or innate knowledge. Pinker published a ...”

“... tutor-organiser for Durham, to tell her if she’d ever be a writer, I asked her and her husband David to dinner when I was sitting in the North-East and exposed my dilettantish flank by letting slip that I was barely halfway through Regeneration. Even so we have remained friends. Coming to Devon in the winter of 1998 on my last-ever circuit, I wrote to ask ...”

“... time the lonely outsider commemorated by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and (more cannily) Wordsworth. David Fairer maintains that their Wertherisation of Chatterton’s alleged suicide concentrated the Romantic poets’ minds on their own social isolation, on the necessary dissidence of the poet’s task and the short time reserved for its performance. Chatterton ...”

“... of emotion,’ Vernon recalls of his friendship with Jesus. ‘My buddy, who once did the best David Letterman impression you ever saw, has been abducted by glandular acids.’ (Compare Richard Tull’s lament in The Information that, at 45, he no longer ‘snags on the DNA’. Amis is being literary; but Vernon is not supposed to be a writer.) For all the ...”

“... after last-minute doubts made her abandon her wedding; from her room, she writes letters to David, the married lover she left back in England. Their affair is undone by his self-indulgence, the egoism that allows him to whisk Edith into the wings when she threatens his comfortable life at home: ‘She knew that he was a man who could not deny himself ...”