“... of late but it never sells. On 6 November 1992 it was estimated at 75,000 Swiss francs for the David Feldman Rarities of the World auction in Zurich. On 11 December 1993 it was back in New Zealand again, as Lot 237 at John Mowbray’s Stanley Gibbons auction and again it didn’t sell. It is not unusual for a stamp to come onto the market at a price higher ...”

“... Are we all bare-faced liars?’ The question came from Jonathan Aitken, Minister of State for Defence Procurement, in January 1994. It was put to the then editor of the Guardian, Peter Preston. The words ‘we all’ referred to Aitken himself, his wife Lolicia and his faithful Arab friend Said Ayas. The answer to the question was ‘yes’. They were all bare-faced liars, but none more so than the debonair minister himself ...”

“... need not produce notes at all. He first provided endnotes, not footnotes, and it was a letter from David Hume that urged him to put source references on the page. Gibbon took this advice, but put the satirical notes on the page also, with great benefit to the reader, for now the joke was not so widely separated from its occasion. In another of his ...”

“... long and slow’, ‘the rain, immanent as stars,/now falling, falling slowly’. ‘In Memoriam David Jones’ has the title of an elegy but is entirely a poem about landscape. Jones probably made as much use of landscape as any poet has ever done, but Robertson’s poem has nothing of Jones’s High Modernist style. Its six-line stanzas are composed of a ...”

“... government.’ The media rallied to his call, and so did less likely allies. The novelist David Grossman went on TV to urge a ‘unity government’ of Likud and Blue and White. ‘Hatred will wait for better days … we need an emergency unity government now,’ Aviv Geffen, a rock star and once a leading peace activist, said in an op-ed. Even the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to a nearby house by Michael Manser and to the Council House in Salisbury. Douglas Stephen’s David Murray John Tower in central Swindon is one of the finest buildings in Britain of its age (early 1970s) – a sleek homage to Frank Hampson, illustrator of Dan Dare. And that’s about it. Little remains unchanged of the Department of Scientific and ...”

“... David Soren​ of the University of Arizona was excavating the remains of a villa just outside Lugnano in Umbria in 1992 when he uncovered a fifth-century mass grave: 47 small skeletons had been interred in layers, some pressed into large amphorae. A number of them were newborn babies. The deepest layer held only a corpse or two, but the higher levels were increasingly populated ...”

“... and its importance to national wealth and power. He referred to Voltaire and Montesquieu, and to David Hume, who in 1753 had unequivocally judged African lesser than white men. He regarded Buffon as a major antagonist, with his insistence that climate determined skin colour. Barrère, the anatomist and contributor to the 1741 essay competition, was more to ...”

“... a pile of skulls, a mass grave. Among the perpetrators is a pig-faced soldier wearing a Star of David and a helmet with ‘Mossad’ written on it. In the background stands a man with sidelocks, a crooked nose, bloodshot eyes and fangs for teeth. He is dressed in a suit, chewing on a cigar and wearing a hat marked ‘SS’: an Orthodox Jew, represented as a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and folk tales are clumsy and blundering and foolish, and their strength doesn’t always prevail: David fells Goliath with a slingshot (like a child in a bombsite playground), and poor boy Jack can outwit the ogre at the top of the beanstalk, however big and strong and vicious and rich he is, and make off with the golden goose. Such stories are popular ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of hesitation or doubt. His examples include Achilles, Odysseus, Beowulf, Hildebrand, Samson and David. A hero of this type ‘so perfectly embodies the values of his culture that he experiences no doubts’: Achilles, for instance, is said to be motivated entirely by ‘archaic blood vengeance’. Yet the Iliad could be said to fit Ziolkowski’s model ...”