“... Valentino got to ‘strut half naked in another prolonged dressing scene’. Leider disagrees with David Bret’s claim, in Valentino: A Dream of Desire, that Valentino was ‘a closeted gay man whose close friendships with men involved sex . . . and that Natacha was exclusively a lesbian who enjoyed setting up her husband with other men.’ Yet she ...”

“... French version, the yarmulka is out and the cross (along with the hand of Fatima and the Star of David) has to be very discreet, while some tricky technical problems remain over how to rule on Sikh students. Opponents, including the main French human rights organisation, La Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, have argued rightly that the veil is the real target ...”

“... equipped 101st Airborne Division had been stationed in Mosul. The division’s commander, General David Petraeus, probably the most intelligent senior American officer in Iraq, reached a tentative understanding with the local Sunni Arab establishment. Thousands of former army officers took a public oath renouncing the Baath Party. The Kurds were furious that ...”

“... with imperialism. Cromer’s rule in Egypt exemplified this. It was full of display – what David Cannadine calls ‘ornamentalism’ – designed to impress both aristocrats and peasants. He also had to compete with Egypt’s formal (or puppet) ruler, the khedive, in this field. Owen suggests that another purpose of all this showing off was to hide the ...”

“... herself marooned on a desert island with a slave whom she despises but is wholly reliant on’. David Dabydeen, whose 1987 book, Hogarth’s Blacks, was a study of ‘Images of Blacks in 18th-Century English Art’, based his novel A Harlot’s Progress (1999) on a startled black servant in one of Hogarth’s illustrations for The Harlot’s Progress. He ...”

“... to be added to spore suspensions to stop them clumping when they are prepared and dried, but as David Henderson from Porton Down said in 1952, in a journal to be found in any medical school library, ‘fortunately many substances added to the suspension will prevent clumping. The simplest and most effective that has been found is sodium alginate used in ...”

“... de l’Etoile’ is both the location of the Arc de Triomphe and the site of the Star of David worn by Jews during the Occupation. The narrator doesn’t know why she was picked up, only that she finally left Drancy for Auschwitz with her father, who had also been arrested, in September 1942. Her mother, arrested and released in July because no ...”

“... eldest son, Bill, was dull; and of the other three boys, all of whom were highly intelligent, only David fulfilled his potential. Against his mother’s violent and continuing opposition her husband made him editor of the Astor-owned Observer, where he proved himself to be probably the best of all British post-Second World War editors. The other two, as well ...”

“... unbreakable spirit to win! Fighting the Hun with pepper? Was that something that Jimmy Perry and David Croft, the fecund scriptwriters of Dad’s Army, dreamed up in a dizzy moment? Not so. Charles Graves, an early historian of the Home Guard, refers to a unit which suggested in orders that any rudimentary weapons ‘could be usefully supplemented by a ...”

“... a more crisply informed account we need to turn to the work of the Marxist geographer-historian, David Harvey). At the psychic and cultural level, the outcomes were often paradoxical: Haussmann’s glittering city, with its spanking new boulevards and enticing department stores, was felt by many to be a blank, empty at the heart. Edmond de Goncourt wrote in ...”

“... too close to it may in many cases be destructive. Circumstances must come in.’ In the 18th, David Hume believed that ‘parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle’, were ‘perhaps the most extraordinary and unaccountable phenomenon’ that had yet appeared, and that ‘all general maxims in politics ought to be established with ...”

“... the wickedness of the market, only to keep the market in its proper place. In Silent Theft, David Bollier shows how isolated ‘gift economies’ can flourish within a larger market economy. One example is the subculture of people who have developed software and distributed it for free on the Internet. Another example is the community gardens that ...”

“... are a proper visible expression of forces at work on the structure. The final result, according to David Newland, technical adviser to the bridge’s funding body, is ‘probably the most complex passively-damped structure in the world’. (In an actively-damped system an input of energy is required to answer the force with a counterforce; in a passive ...”

“... have suspected it, but in Lloyd George’s lifetime it was never publicly exposed. Margaret and David Lloyd George continued to share houses, holidays, family cares and political duties; and Stevenson’s competence at her job (not to mention the fact that she looked, as John Campbell notes, ‘too prim to be anything so improper as a mistress’) warded ...”

“... of biblical truth. For the modern reader, such relentless classicism can cause odd problems. As David Daiches once remarked, we are often in the uncomfortable position of forming our knowledge of classical mythology by inferring from Miltonic allusion. Most modern students probably first encounter Ovid’s Narcissus through Milton’s Eve, gazing on her own ...”