“... being accompanied by husbands or fathers (like Horace Walpole’s darling Mary and Agnes Berry), a surprising number went on their own. The amorous affairs of the young Grand Tourists seem usually to have been conducted within the endogamous British upper class, although David Hume made himself ridiculous by his ...”

“... prototypical dead youth who had sacrificed his life for the Nation. (His funeral was organised by David.) Then, after the fall of Robespierre, there was what Ben-Amos calls Rousseau’s more ‘integrative’ funeral, whose pastoral imagery soothed the crowds as the body made its way from its quiet grave on an island in a country lake to the national shrine ...”

“... Lord Beaverbrook was making the Daily Express ‘a paper of prejudice, not thought’. And the Berry brothers, up from Methyr Tydfil, were moving from Boxing magazine to the Financial Times and Daily Telegraph and to peerages as Lords Camrose and Kemsley. Fleet Street was vulgar, tough, unprincipled and competitive, a world away from the austere values of ...”

“... in timeless habits. Hill illustrates a painting very much in this taste, depicting the Duchesse de Berry as Mary, Queen of Scots, sailing to exile in Scotland after the July Revolution of 1830. ‘Marie-Caroline, Duchesse de Berry’ by an unknown artist (c.1830). She also documents the many ways in which, on this side ...”

“... and as long as our environmental consciousness is tied to the idea of breathtaking scenery or David Attenborough’s ramblings about charismatic fauna, we will be satisfied with the preservation of beautiful symbols. Activists chain themselves to trees while Coca-Cola appeases guilty consciences by printing some arrows in a Möbius loop on the label of a ...”

“... the wealthier the patron, the more lavish the decoration. In the Très riches heures du duc de Berry, peasants wear ultramarine to do fieldwork. Many manuscripts are celebrated for their riot of detail. But Gertsman tracks the opposite of that plenitude: the deliberate void that invites the viewer to fill an absence. Such a lacuna might signify anything ...”

“... in his Bromley and Chislehurst constituency. A couple of months earlier, another Conservative MP, David Morris, apologised for lobbying on behalf of an energy firm that had given him £10,000. Morris had urged the energy minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, to lobby Ofgem to change regulations in ways that could benefit Aquind Limited, which is seeking to build an ...”

“... To understand Nicole Kidman, David Thomson argues, you need to see a film called In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders ...”

“... hillside. He will exchange his blue team jersey (‘United States Postal Service presented by Berry Floor’, a Belgian flooring company) for the leader’s maillot jaune. Half an hour later, the last of the 147 riders (198 began the Tour) will haul himself across the finish line while Armstrong’s televised grin beams down from the landscape-eclipsing ...”

“... dead art – when the last five years had seen the Commodore recordings of Coleman Hawkins and Chu Berry and a year ahead lay Gillespie’s ‘Groovin’ High’ and ‘Dizzy Atmosphere’. In the same way, an affecting review of Shoeshine, in 1947, turns in its second part to lament that, after a promising start in this film and Open City and Paisan, the new ...”

“... as further telegrams, even more alarming, came from Herzog. In 1944, the US envoy in Dublin, David Gray, discussed President Roosevelt’s War Refugee Board with the Irish Government and expressed the US Administration’s delight when the Irish Government agreed in principle to take 500 Jewish refugee children. When there was a question of accepting ...”

“... good intentions of the staff’. Writing in the British Medical Journal in 2018 the NHS consultant David Oliver argued that public (as opposed to expert) debate ‘is obsessed with the notion that, when things go wrong in healthcare, this must indicate failures by individuals. In such a narrative, systemic factors … are seen as convenient excuses for ...”

“... In​ 1975 David Bowie was in Los Angeles pretending to star in a film that wasn’t being made, adapted from a memoir he would never complete, to be called ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious ...”

“... The most notable New York venues in that era were probably the Sanctuary and the Loft, home to DJ David Mancuso. Saturday Night For Ever includes some enthusiastic reminiscences of the gay scene in London: the drugs, the songs and the very late nights. The camp, glam impulses behind the upsurge in gay clubbing influenced the image of disco in the ...”

“... now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. David Hume liked this story, and in 1741 retold it in his marvellous essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he wrestled with the question of whether such delicacy of judgment was really possible. Some people doubted any such thing, but he did not. Writing in ...”