“... serve as the title for dozens of the stories in this book. A man loses a one-of-a-kind Star of David while swimming at Atlantic City; ten years later, he finds it in an antique store in upstate New York. A woman living in Washington DC is mistaken by a stranger for another woman; years later, in San Francisco, the same stranger bumps into her and repeats ...”

“... it, because not understanding it in scientific terms is not to understand it at all, but David Bodanis, the author of E=mc2, is not one of them. As someone to whom science has always been a black hole, I see Bodanis and those who bother to try to explain to the likes of me what they understand mathematically as therapists of a sort. Not to understand ...”

“... and pamphlets easily surpasses in size (and in price) the principal older collections edited by F.C. Mather and Edward Royle, although for the hardy there remains a less easily available set put together by Dorothy Thompson, the doyenne of Chartist studies. Claeys is a past master of the art of compilation, having already produced similar collections of the ...”

“... as well as more representative of the state of 16th-century history: Natalie Zemon Davis, David Cressy, Eamon Duffy. More privately, there is the story he tells us in his prologue about his acceding, if sheepishly, to the unspoken wishes of his dead father by saying Kaddish for him. Which seems a more human response than his refusal, recorded in the ...”

“... Ernst, a friend of Boué’s, he met the Surrealist poets and painters, and with Herbert Read and David Gascoyne, introduced Surrealism to England. He helped persuade Picasso (it didn’t take much) to contribute to the 1936 exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in Piccadilly, which launched the movement in Britain. As Penrose tells it, Eluard had taken ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... only way he will be able do it. Nevertheless, Trump’s appointment as his ambassador to Israel of David Friedman, a long-time contributor to the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and an unhinged right-winger who has accused Israeli and American Jewish supporters of a two-state solution as being ‘worse than kapos’, hardly supports the notion ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as late as 1891 spoke no language other than Welsh (39-year-old Evan James and his sons John and David). But what moves us about these census records is not curious job titles or strange placenames. The vast majority of users of ancestry.co.uk are family historians, who, as Deborah Cohen observes in Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain ...”

“... of leadership – in other words, don’t worry, the menfolk are keeping Arlene right. Challenging David Davis to ‘stand up to the EU’, Ian Paisley Jr declared in the House of Commons that ‘It’s about time the government displayed a no surrender attitude – stand up to them, man!’ Sammy Wilson, the DUP member for East Antrim, agreed and spoke of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in 2010, isn’t present. After a Saturday bullfight in Valladolid, I went to Tordesillas with David Penton, secretary of the Club Taurino of London. He is something of a hero there for his defence of the toro de la vega, the bête noire of the anti-bullfighting lobby. There was to be a parade lit by lanterns that evening, and a toro de la vega on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... knocked on the classroom door asking to be let in. I happened to be in a politics lesson when David Cameron was declared the new leader of the Conservative Party in December 2005 (‘He’ll never get it,’ our teacher had said a few weeks previously). I was there again in May 2007 when Tony Blair announced he was stepping down as prime minister and ...”

“... 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 ...”