“... explain and go to check the newspapers. The Independent has a well-informed and balanced piece by David McKittrick on the genesis of the ceasefire. He seems cautiously optimistic. Not so that other old ham, Conor Cruise O’Brien, writing on the same newspaper’s opinion pages. O’Brien sees the timing of the ceasefire as evidence of a Machiavellian plot to ...”

“... the Party, the crisis within ruling circles in the Eighties, perestroika. On all these subjects, David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb is the more acute and penetrating guide. Kapuściński spends no time in dissidents’ apartments, or at the crowded press conferences in Moscow’s international press centre; high politics bores him. He has slipped away from the ...”

“... a series of indictments and tax investigations. Kennedy’s replacement on the McCarthy staff was David Schine, too rich and too good-looking for his own good, an empty-headed chaser of pinks and reds. In 1952 Cohn and Schine went on a junket to Europe, to find and root out the Communist books on the shelves of the US Information Service, a State Department ...”

“... part of the century. Filipczak draws attention to the career of another upwardly-mobile painter, David Teniers II, who fashioned a variant of the gallery picture at mid-century: shells, scientific instruments and so on are jettisoned in favour of works of art placed in an environment reminiscent of a modern picture collection, a constcamer. This change of ...”

“... even if (as I suggested a few weeks ago) there was not then the degree of national consensus which David Marquand, in The Unprincipled Society, would have us believe, there was at any rate full employment, or as near to it as a liberal-democratic capitalist society is ever going to get. But just as, in the Thirties, the failure of the previous Labour ...”

“... to another style of American comedy either, the blandly sarcastic, deliberately unfunny manner of David Letterman (which has its own downsided literary counterpart in Carver’s dreary and attenuated epiphanies and Didion’s distressed reportage). In Prêt-à-Porter Altman is deliberately frivolous and shallow because he has made a farce, not because he aims ...”

“... Jean Renoir was admired by his followers and contemporaries for the relaxed feel of his films. He himself loved the improvisatory quality of the Commedia dell’Arte, which he saw as a struggle between ‘the tendency toward exterior realism and that toward interior realism’, and wrote that what he considered to be ‘the ultimate in cinema as in theatre’ was ‘a style and dialogue that sometimes borders on the burlesque ...”

“... by the Moreel triptych and some thirty more works, was classed along with Van Eyck and Gerard David as the great Flemish primitive. On that occasion his particular Flemish religiosity (again with the less-than-convincing comparison to Fra Angelico) was emphasised. On the one hand, the very model of a Flemish primitive master; on the other, the German ...”

“... bath-chair, the girl clean-run like a salmon, the best shot in England after His Majesty. In 1975, David Daniell published a book of criticism, nicely entitled (from Bunyan) The Interpreter’s House. This work was for John Buchan’s besieged supporters like the scraps of burning straw blown by the wind over the flooded dykes as the Dutch fleet sailed to the ...”

“... not a lot. He had a thin moustache, an air of suave indifference borrowed from Fred Astaire or David Niven, and he was interested in any woman who wasn’t my mother.’ Both fathers drive at 105 mph singing ‘Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today,’ and both leave home to get some milk, returning weeks later with a bottle in each hand and ...”

“... in a ‘History of Civilisation’ series, in which it joins such works as Charles Burney and David Marshall Lang’s The People of the Hills: Ancient Ararat and Caucasus (1971) and George Lichtheim’s Europe in the 20th Century (1972). Indeed, the back of Lichtheim’s book announced Lewis’s work as forthcoming, though it then bore the title The ...”

“... white grin, held for much longer than it takes to say ‘cheese’, I can see a glimpse of what David Thomson calls Kelly’s ‘harsh, calculating cheerfulness’. It is a picture of an all-American confidence, one that was not just Kelly’s but belonged to his audience and to his time. (Johnny Green recalls his Freed Unit colleagues as ‘the laughingest ...”

“... about, and it does, the painters may do it best. Yet they may need critics to make them talk, as David Sylvester, the great master of the interviewing discipline, has induced Hodgkin to talk in the past. When all is said the paintings do the real talking in their own tongue, but we still need to have our attention directed to them, our possible blindnesses ...”

“... Perhaps all books are messages from other times and places, even the ones written yesterday and just down the road. But these three works by Kenzaburo Oë, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, have an unusual flavour of missives cast into the sea long ago, only now arriving on our island beach. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids was published in Japan in 1958, and is now translated for the first time ...”

“... a clerihew there), went on pushing his luck. Then in late life he underwent a volte face, telling David Frost that the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship had been ‘nearly always justified. I think it’s a very, very good thing indeed.’ Was this another betrayal on the Judas Iscariot scale? Or a belated recognition that tennis is best played with a ...”