“... 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 ...”

“... Fire and Fury: ‘better books’, she said, would be published soon. Better books? She mentioned David Frum’s Trumpocracy as an example, with its less than thrilling subtitle ‘The Corruption of the American Republic’. The errors of Wolff’s book, and its stylistic shortcomings, were said to be indicative of deeper flaws in Michael Wolff the man: was ...”

“... choosing: as well as Anthony Kennedy, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Lewis Powell, Warren Burger, David Souter and John Paul Stevens all did so. For Ginsburg to stay on the court risked ‘disaster’, in Randall Kennedy’s view: ‘The female Thurgood Marshall will be replaced by a female Clarence Thomas.’ Marshall was the first black justice on the ...”

“... part of the UK’s national security and foreign policy. Commenting on the Rwanda judgment, David Gauke, the former secretary of state for justice, quoted Margaret Thatcher’s claim, after the Falklands War, that Britain’s role in the world was ‘upholding international law and teaching the nations of the world how to live’. There is an ...”

“... was like without the internet’.In an essay on the work of Jean Piaget, the child psychologist David Elkind used the term ‘cognitive alien’ to suggest just how differently very young children see the world – believing, for instance, that the sun and moon follow them as they walk around. For Elkind, the main problem in education is communication: a ...”

“... during the period under review. Is this an example of the new ‘tory’ history, identified by David Cannadine and others, in which the systematic dismantling of the epic events of yesteryear both symbolises and contributes to British national decline? Perhaps, but I do not think so. Though Dr Webster’s account is more complex and less heroic than ...”

“... the Black Prince winning his spurs and, by the end of the year, both John II of France and David II of Scotland safely locked up in the Tower of London awaiting ransom. Mission accomplished. Except it wasn’t. Sumption takes us on through the chevauchées – the large-scale mounted raids that the English used to weaken and demoralise the French in ...”

“... for taxation purposes. Everybody had to report to his own family town. Joseph, a descendant of David, accordingly travelled from Nazareth in Galilee, where he was then living, to Bethlehem in Judaea, and here his betrothed wife Mary gave birth to her son Jesus. The scholars, both of yesterday and today, including A.N. Wilson, tell us that there was no ...”

“... who wrote nothing, was prosecuted for impiety, or when Spinoza was excommunicated, or when David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature ‘fell dead-born from the press’. Kitcher’s ‘growing conviction that contemporary Anglophone philosophy has lost its audience’ suggests that he is thinking instead of the recent past. ‘Indeed, as I look back to ...”

“... Divorcing was reissued by New York Review Books in 2020 with an introduction by Sontag’s son, David Rieff. Lament for Julia is now available for the first time, along with nine of her short stories. Taubes’s fiction is autobiographical. She writes female protagonists who are daughters of psychoanalysts or trapped in fluorescently unhappy marriages or ...”

“... to embed herself within networks of mutually supportive artists and thinkers. Her paintings of David Garrick and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, made in Rome early in her career, helped to establish her fame in Britain, where she moved in 1766. Shortly after she arrived, her portrait was painted by Joshua Reynolds, soon to be president of the Royal ...”

“... may sometimes make obstreperous territorial claims, he said, ‘but they don’t do anything.’ David Daokui Li, the director of the Centre for China in the World Economy at Tsinghua University, has argued that, ‘facing the increasingly hawkish stance of the United States’, the consensus within China is ‘to respect and negotiate with the United States ...”

“... and powerful friends. She had been a celebrity on What’s My Line? and lives on as the subject of David Bowie’s song ‘God Knows I’m Good’. God knows what the authorities would do to a hardened, inarticulate sneak thief from the lower classes. And even if the magistrates were in a forgiving mood, what about the shame? My grandmother had neither a lucid ...”

“... interesting.’Ono also produced a catalogue for her imaginary exhibition, The Museum of Modern (F)Art. It opens with a photomontage of her standing next to an oversized jar in the MoMA sculpture garden. Photographs of corridors, galleries and street scenes are overlaid with arrows pointing to invisible flies. The catalogue and an accompanying short film are ...”

“... embody ‘MAGA: The Next Generation’. JD Vance, formerly known as James Donald Bowman, James David Hamel and J.D. Vance, now strangely rebranded without the stops, is a self-styled ‘hillbilly’ whose backwoods was Middletown, Ohio, an industrial suburb of Cincinnati (pop. 50,987), where he went from poverty to Yale Law School. He wrote a bestselling ...”