“... to. In 1987, in the catalogue published to accompany an exhibition about the Harlem Renaissance, David Levering Lewis referred to Larsen as ‘the mysterious and lovely Virgin Islander’. Eight years later, in When Harlem Was in Vogue, Lewis relayed the (unsourced) information that Larsen was looked down on by ‘some of her fellow Virgin Islanders’ for ...”

“... to corral. The empire keeps producing idealised images of fixed order, as the fine work of David Quint and Philip Hardie has demonstrated, yet this order is always being disrupted and challenged by the movement of history. Virgil acknowledges at many turns the fact that the imperialist, like the man in the first simile in the Georgics, will be swept ...”

“... the hegemony of the hueless – the rule of white and grey, the ‘chromophobia’ on which David Batchelor published a lively essay in 2000 – creeps in. The promise of bright colour retreats or gets privatised, and a patch of fierce scarlet here or vibrant viridian there henceforward becomes little more than a trigger for consumer salivation. That ...”

“... that turned up in the 1950s, but eventually joined in and had a huge success with Richardson in David Storey’s Home, described by Lindsay Anderson, who directed it, as ‘one of those uniquely happy, harmonious and fulfilling theatre experiences that happen, if one is lucky, once in a lifetime … Gielgud’s moments of pure, exposed emotion are ...”

“... that. More important, the computer itself is changing at blurring speed. As a character puts it in David Lodge’s new novel: ‘Computer chips are getting smaller and smaller and more and more powerful all the time. They’re improving faster than any machine in history. It’s been calculated that if cars had developed at the same rate as computers over the ...”

“... emerges out of something Sennett says in passing about his old mentor, the Harvard sociologist David Riesman, the author of The Lonely Crowd. Sennett’s picture of what the Jewish Riesman achieved in relation to the wealthy Wasp elite into which he married focuses not on the importance of his feeling respected by them but on his capacity to treat the Wasp ...”

“... a lifelong enemy of slavery and an inveterate racist. The most recent full-scale biography, by David Donald, published in 1995, offered a Lincoln buffeted by forces outside his control, a man of few deep convictions who failed to lead public opinion – rather like Bill Clinton. Although conceived before 11 September, both Richard Carwardine and Daniel ...”

“... from Indian takeaways. Within a couple of paragraphs in Injury Time, he moves from Yeats to David Beckham to Dame Gillian Beer – consummations devoutly to be desired. He is consistently pleasantly unpredictable, in the way that, say, E.B. White was consistently pleasantly unpredictable, or perhaps Alastair Cooke delivering his weekly Letter from ...”

“... travel. It is the internal passport, an instrument of state control like the identity cards that David Blunkett is planning for us. Until 2002 it recorded not only your name, age and address, but your ‘nationality’ as well. Our word ‘Russian’ does duty for two distinct adjectives, rossiski and russki. The Russian Federation, like the Russian Academy ...”

“... as well as the patriarch’s retinue of scientists and theologians, stood like a row of Caspar David Friedrich solitaries, facing the ice as if facing their judge. The Ilulissat ice fjord leads back to one of the world’s most powerful glaciers, the Sermeq Kujalleq. Its cliff-like face is three miles wide and, counting its hidden underwater bulk, nearly a ...”

“... may want to withdraw troops from Iraq but its leaders outdo each other in condemning Iran. General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, has accused Iran of being behind the latest fighting in Baghdad and Basra. He admitted during his appearance before Congress on 8 April that any improvement in security is fragile. Over the last few months, Iraq has ...”

“... time to prepare for [the black migration] is now,’ one unusually far-sighted policy-maker, David Cohn, wrote in 1947. ‘But since we as a nation rarely act until catastrophe is upon us, it is likely we shall muddle along until it is too late.’ By the late 1960s the catastrophe had happened. ‘Repeated visits to Hunt’s Point in the South ...”

“... at the best of times – failed to perceive their good fortune; they still don’t.Although David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had played a central role in negotiating the agreement, many unionists believed they had been conned. While the agreement won the near unanimous endorsement of nationalists in Northern Ireland, it was ...”

“... v. Argentina in the 1998 World Cup – the match in which Michael Owen scored that goal and David Beckham was shown that effigy-birthing red card. It was at McDonald’s that I was introduced to tactical discourse and talk of transfer windows; to the idea that a player being sold by a club for millions of pounds could be seen as liberating while we ...”

“... zones’ across the territory it seized – territory which the UK’s current foreign secretary, David Lammy, has referred to as having been ‘liberated’. Gary Jones, BP’s regional president for Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, has used similar language, telling an audience at Energy Week 2022 that Karabakh is the ‘perfect opportunity for a fully ...”