“... in England in the 1720s, became the subject of intense debate among Enlightenment men, including David Hume, James Ramsay and Edward Long. Were Africans different or were they ‘the same’? Could they write poetry? Could they claim gentility? Long devoted an entire chapter of the History to an attempted demolition of Williams, a man who represented a ...”

“... UnHerd Club, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins visible in a corner with something or other by David Starkey. ‘Just pray,’ is his answer for the ages, with UnHerd’s main office on the floor below and its new all-day brasserie on the floor below that. Klein says that the question she is left with is not, ‘How did a person like that turn into a ...”

“... an eye kept on Jim Callaghan when he was Foreign Secretary and therefore placed the reliable David Ennals as Number Two in the Foreign Office, so Mrs Thatcher wanted to keep her potential successor, Michael Heseltine, ‘under surveillance’. Readers of the London Review of Books, if they are interested, must really look for themselves at Ponting’s ...”

“... is not ornamental. It matters. In the review written in 2017 by the current foreign secretary, David Lammy, ‘into the treatment of, and outcomes for, Black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals in the criminal justice system’, Lammy writes that ‘juries deliberate as a group through open discussion. This both deters and exposes prejudice or ...”

“... and law, but in his own day was a controversial figure. The Provençal rabbi Abraham ben David (‘Rabad’) criticised him for, among other things, his insistence that God is not embodied. After his death in 1204, Jews living in Montpellier helped persuade the Christian authorities to burn copies of his greatest philosophical work, The Guide to the ...”

“... The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing David Copperfield’s opening speculation whether he would turn out the hero of his own life story. The object of this is to characterise the young Olivier as a Dickens child, a version of David, and his father, the widowed ...”

“... which was deplored even at the time of the centenary of publication 38 years ago, when Elizabeth David pointed out that the currently available Mrs Beeton didn’t contain a single recipe from the original. That this is an odd state of affairs does not of itself make a facsimile of the 1861 book an interesting object. People buy and use the modern Mrs Beeton ...”

“... in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being shelled: ‘They must be mad. Don’t they know it’s very unsafe shooting things at other people?’ A US Sergeant in Vietnam recalled: ‘You thought, “How the fuck can they do this to ...”

“... people. The campus novel with which Amis and his younger contemporaries Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge began is a sub-division of the genre. The more recent campus novels have allowed more serious, ‘shop’ conversations into their dialogues than ever Lucky Jim did, but then Stanley and the Women does too: it’s not the university setting but a ...”

“... opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’, has ...”

“... probably the most important book yet to appear in the dissident-Communist perspective. Fortunately David Fernbach’s translation makes it accessible (apart from a few Volapük lapses like ‘genial’ for génial) and copes ruggedly with the steeper philosophical faces. The perspective itself is questionable, however. Without objecting for a moment to the ...”

“... same thing, but not sketchily, and across a very wide range of films; and the central argument of David Bordwell’s book is similar. Perez is interested in ‘the properties and possibilities of the medium’, but thinks that what distinguishes them is their variousness. ‘Most theorists have attempted to define the nature of film as something ...”

“... as the trial approached, his attitude changed perceptibly. Writing to his friend the journalist David Ayerst, Tippett declared himself ‘very much at peace and ready to go’.On 21 August 1943, at 7.30 a.m. precisely, after serving two months of his three-month sentence, Tippett was released from Wormwood Scrubs. He was met by Britten and Pears, who would ...”

“... counterproductive and ideologically driven’. In September, the Tory civil libertarian David Davis told Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News, an unlikely place to hear a defence of unions, that ‘there are bits of [the bill] which look OTT, like requiring pickets to give their names to the police force. What is this? This isn’t Franco’s Britain.’ The ...”

“... readable because animated by all of Grigson’s brilliant erudition and spirit of advocacy. Lord David Cecil’s long chapter in his 1969 book Visionary and Dreamer: Two Poetic Painters (the other one is Burne-Jones) is a more languid affair, but it usefully brought Cecil’s own Romantic instincts to bear on a painter whose inspiration was often professedly ...”