“... as well as a mathematical significance. Exactly one hundred years earlier, the mathematician David Hilbert had delivered a lecture in which he had identified what he took to be the (23 in his case) most important unsolved mathematical problems of his day. Hilbert’s problems were a spur to some of the most productive mathematical research of the 20th ...”

“... but the book was also filled with examples of that attractive canny madness which R.D. Laing and David Cooper were analysing as higher wisdom. Stigma told me about the nature of outsiders, ways of not belonging which redeemed my sense of not belonging, and The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life made sense of more or less everything, but especially the ...”

“... of folly and murder.’ In his celebration of the West, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), David Landes contemptuously describes 19th-century Latin American states as having ‘republican trappings’ that unsuccessfully disguised the reality of societies dominated by ‘a small group of rascals’ while ‘the masses squatted and scraped.’ Even ...”

“... both of whom were closely involved in Edward VI’s education. Alford may have been misled by David Starkey, who repeats the myth that in those years Elizabeth was educated by Catherine Parr. Actually, she was educated with Edward and did not live with Catherine Parr until 1547. In 1550, Elizabeth appointed Cecil one of her legal officers and he remained ...”

“... the northern isles? Indeed, Stewart reminds us that as late as the 12th century the Scottish king David I described himself as the ruler of a mixed people, not only Gaelic Scots, but Northumbrians, Flemings and Cumbric Britons. Multi-ethnic kingdoms, significantly, preceded nations. By the early 14th century these various ethnic groups were described as a ...”

“... to change the form of words slightly, seem to me pictures of Jerusalem, Toledo and Andalusia by David Bomberg. (It is no doubt hard to look past subsequent history and accept Bomberg’s Zionism for the strange thing it was, but paintings like his Pool of Hezekiah and Rooftops, Jerusalem are as close to Corot in Italy or Seurat at Gravelines as anyone since ...”

“... Henry de Mille, was an Episcopal minister who became a playwright, one of the theatre producer David Belasco’s first collaborators. He discouraged his sons William and Cecil from going into the theatre but they didn’t listen. William de Mille, Agnes’s father, became a successful New York playwright, known for dramas with a social conscience; Cecil ...”

“... Beckett, and none for John Berger, who was cool at first, then much warmer, coming under fire from David Sylvester – another S – for disparaging Giacometti’s work in the 1950s, and then for revising his opinion after the artist’s death in 1966. ‘Head of a Woman’ (1936) The first room contains a superb display of heads, dating from ...”

“... was always ready with the smiling inquiry about his old paper: ‘How are you all getting on?’ David Horspool I did not know John well personally but I did know him as an editor of great distinction. He brought out the best in me. His wit and taste and high standards made me better than I am. I am grateful to him and mourn his death. Thomas Laqueur John ...”

“... he might be tempted to make such a barely thinkable journey, it was now. He was 31, famous for the David and the Pietà, but his dealings with the pope were deadlocked. If Europe’s ultimate patron was being difficult, perhaps a more obliging one could be found elsewhere. In his author’s note, Enard cannily stops short of asserting the factuality of the ...”

“... Ukraine). He belonged to a family of Polonised Jewish landowners, and as his new biographer David Hayton notes, was uncircumcised. The family had been called Niemirowski, but this surname was dropped as part of the enforced Germanisation of Jewish surnames in the later 18th century. His parents classed themselves as Roman Catholics, though organised ...”

“... now and to our divisions. By contrast to Lola and Steve, there’s the retired Scottish doctor, David: ‘How could the English be so stupid, he thinks again pointlessly, how could they not see the ring of yellow stars on every new road and hospital and upgraded railway and city centre regeneration of the last thirty years?’ Arms sales, the refugee ...”

“... workers’ co-operatives, hospitals and cinemas. When the state of Israel was established, David Ben-Gurion made him head of the Government Planning Department. In The Object of Zionism (2018) the architectural historian Zvi Efrat explained that, though Sharon’s master plan was based on the latest principles of modernist design, it had several other ...”

“... site of some of the happiest moments of the narrator’s youth. She has memories of concerts by David Bowie, the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart, and of Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1987. The protagonist of Donoso’s 1986 novel, Curfew, is based on Víctor Jara, the Chilean protest singer and poet who was among those killed at the stadium. The character ...”

“... put to flight the emperors of both East and West on the same day. What have we to fear from King David and ‘his half-naked natives’?If Walter Espec did say anything of this sort, his words wouldn’t have meant much to his English levies. Some of it is simply false, such as the same-day defeat of both emperors (the events were in fact two years apart, in ...”