“... 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 ...”

“... Cowdrey let him down. When the MCC’s handling of the affair provoked a members’ revolt, led by David Sheppard and Mike Brearley, this, Oborne claims, ‘put the wind up’ Cowdrey, who clearly wanted to placate everybody. In the end, oddly, Cowdrey took D’Oliveira to Alec Douglas-Home’s London flat, where Home told him to stick to cricket and let ...”

“... of military tribunals recently disposed of its first case. The defendant was the Australian David Hicks, held at Guantánamo Bay since his capture in Afghanistan in late 2001. For five years it had been said that he had aided the enemy, conspired to wage war crimes, and attempted murder, but when he appeared in court on 1 March this year, a stroke of ...”

“... opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since The Child ...”

“... and sense of water. So I went out and around past the Dean parish church, and the graveyard where David Octavius Hill is buried. I made my way down to the water by the footpath, and walking back in the direction of the bridge, I found a small waterfall, apparently the site of an old mill, and poured Hughey’s ashes out – some into the curling top waters ...”

“... a frequently bloody vengeance that will end the cycle but at a heavy cost. As the Freud-inspired David Quint has argued, this is the dilemma that confronts the central character of the Aeneid. The first part of Virgil’s epic portrays a retrogressive Aeneas, whose boat turns about, who seeks to found a simulacrum of Troy and who wishes for the death that ...”

“... riddle of the finches was only solved more than a century after Darwin’s visit to the Galapagos. David Lack, then a schoolteacher, studied the birds in 1938-39, and in 1947 published his influential Darwin’s Finches, in which he laid out the details of the finches’ adaptive radiation, and emphasised the importance of competition between similar species ...”

“... simplified ecology, with lots of trees-of-heaven, dandelions, robins, ravens and raccoons: what David Quammen calls ‘a planet of weeds’, though if we ourselves, the chief weed, become extinct or get scaled back, even these weedy species may begin evolving into creatures more delicately adapted to specific niches. But that is the million-year view, not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was part of a network of agents, which included William Paterson, another propagandist, and David Fearne, a more conventional spy, whose dispatches to London were channelled through John Bell, the postmaster at Newcastle. Defoe’s pamphlets – bespoke efforts by a man on the spot – helped to ease the passage of the treaty through the Scottish ...”

“... exes are a hard-publishing lot. So far we have had diaries from two of its central figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, and from a spin-doctor hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his ...”