“... before Wimbledon and other prized parts of the output go the way of the Premier League and Sir David Attenborough onto better financed channels. That’s not the only difficulty. It is generally reckoned that if the BBC is to justify being the beneficiary of a poll tax, the BBC needs to reach at least 90 per cent of the UK audience, although there is a bit ...”

“... that quoted respectful comments by American writers and historians, including Justin Kaplan and David Levering Lewis, who had participated in literary gatherings Mrs Bush initiated at the White House. Sittenfeld identified strongly with the portrayal of Laura Bush as a ‘voracious reader of fiction’, whose favourite novel was The Brothers Karamazov. And ...”

“... that despises them … I lived in the monster and know its entrails – and my sling is that of David.’ The next day he was killed by Spanish troops at the battle of Dos Ríos. For three more years the Cubans fought alone against the Spanish. Then, in April 1898, the United States entered the war against a now exhausted Spain, waving the flag of Cuba ...”

“... and shits in America’. The group included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. In August 1944, Carr stabbed and killed Kammerer. Near the end of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a lightly fictionalised and surprisingly engaging account of the murder and of the months leading up to it, written in 1945 by Kerouac and ...”

“... is estimated to be between two and three thousand – were civilians, a percentage endorsed by David Kilcullen, a former senior adviser to General Petraeus. The Brookings Institution gives a grim ratio of one militant killed for every ten civilians. The drones are operated by the CIA, which isn’t subject to military rules of engagement, with the result ...”

“... knew the Old Testament. Upavon’s chapel is called the Cave of Adullam, the stronghold where David sought refuge from Saul’s armies (1 Samuel), presumably as a reminder of the persecution suffered by dissenters; Little Zoar, near Calne, is evidence of the fortress mentality of those strict Calvinists among the Baptists who believed that only the Elect ...”

“... In​ David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the Kinnock-like party leader, George Jones, is a tragic figure. His wit, his passion and his ability to extemporise are gradually extinguished, with his connivance, by a party machine that spends its time trying to out-Tory the Tories. They obey the polls religiously, yet still the voters aren’t ‘churning ...”

“... always likely to be the hardest. Live through that, the novel implies, and you’ve got a chance. (David Cameron in his Party Conference speech was full of praise for a few well established immigrants; under current legislation it’s unlikely they would have been able to establish themselves.) If Sahota’s runaways are not living happily ever after, they are ...”

“... when two tiny tufts of pale feathers sprout from either side of its head, making it look like David Ben-Gurion. Though these tufts last only a few weeks, and aren’t often noticed, they give the bird its name. How was it possible for me to see so little of a bird I thought I knew? And to know so little of a bird I thought I saw? Perhaps it was the ...”

“... Review in 2010, is ‘emblematic of our time’. I doubted this, despite the witty reportage of David Foster Wallace’s essay on their ‘nearly lethal comforts’ and the high artistry of Franzen’s extended cruise scene in The Corrections. I considered luxury liners an example of middlebrow surrealism, certainly not emblematic. But they keep coming into ...”

“... reported case of human infection with the Zika virus was in 1964. Another Entebbe virologist, David Simpson, had a 36-hour fever, some back pain, a headache and a rash. Three days later he had recovered apart from some spots. For many years the Zika virus was thought to be unimportant. There was no evidence to suggest that it could do anything more than ...”

“... he’s quickly recording the patterns of light across this body part or that on an umbered canvas. David Hockney’s now familiar guess that lenses covertly facilitated Caravaggio’s cinematic effects came with a salute to his ‘terrific talent’. My guess is that we should cut out the middleman, and that the only apparatus involved was Caravaggio’s own ...”

“... it is elevated to a sublime combination of nature and architecture, as if painted by Caspar David Friedrich, or by Pückler’s friend Friedrich Schinkel, then the leading architect in Berlin: standing in that allée of ivy-clad columns … you see them recede in perspective until they come together three hundred feet ahead of you, terminating in a ...”

“... political science professor Liu Qing was ‘coupled’ with the economist Xue Zhaofeng (imagine David Runciman and Adam Tooze playing a warring couple on James Corden’s Late Late Show). Liu now gets stopped in the street by fans asking for autographs and selfies. His showbusiness experience has prompted him to think about how far removed academia is from ...”

“... Sebastopol, with its wash of grey sky over a stack of black landscape, is reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich, the town at its centre tiny, visible only in matchstick detail. Elsewhere Crimea, under the unforgiving sun, is rendered lunar, or Martian – pitted, rubbly, leached of shade, the scrub on the cliffs like spotted mould. Fenton made an ...”