“... schoolchildren will be linked in a ‘national grid of learning’. It’s not evident that he or David Blunkett knows precisely what they mean by this feeble echo of Al Gore’s ‘Information Superhighway’. But they have touching faith that Bill Gates has the interests of British schoolchildren close to his heart, and that if we buy his products, we shall ...”

“... The stately home is England’s most characteristic contribution to international tourism. Many countries have old houses which are open to the public. But neither the châteaux of the Loire nor the Palladian villas of the Brenta nor the antebellum homes of Natchez can offer the spectacle of an ancient house, set in its own gardens and park, surrounded by its agricultural estates, crammed with furniture, books and paintings from the past and, best of all, still occupied by a descendant of the family which built it ...”

“... an opportunity to remark that he himself always bore the stigmata of an underclass. According to David Garnett, his hair was ‘of a colour, and grew in a particular way, which I have never seen except in English working men ... incredibly plebeian, mongrel and underbred ... He was the type of the plumber’s mate who goes back to fetch the tools ... the ...”

“... world, and are aware neither of process nor of representation. Vision also depends, as the late David Marr emphasised, on a number of in-built constraints acquired during the course of evolution. Without them, it would be impossible because there are infinitely many different arrangements of objects that would produce the same pattern of light on the ...”

“... heathen died of flu. Outstanding among secular accounts of missionary work in South America is David Stoll’s Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire? (1982), a meticulous analysis of the work of the Wycliffe Bible translators. Missionaries is a book in this tradition, but its canvas is broader, its style more personal and episodic and its condemnation of ...”

“... critic, but brought to life by him as skilfully as is the even more unpromising Leviticus by David Damrosch. Damrosch begins: ‘Perhaps the greatest problem facing students of the Bible as literature is the fact that so much of the Bible is not literature at all’ – a thought which will occur to most of the few readers Leviticus possesses, and which ...”

“... have heard’). ‘Barbara,’ Edmund Wilson decided, ‘is really a bad lot’: so bad that when David Pryce-Jones came to write his memoir of Connolly he thought it best to say nothing about her at all. On the other hand, it is part both of her disobliging character and its attraction that in compiling her own memoirs she does nothing to minimise her ...”

“... books were decorated with Bewick woodcuts; the later ones, like Spoken History, owe much to David Gentleman’s line-drawings. Gentleman’s illustrations can be surrounded in the mind’s eye in the same way as Bewick’s can, by an enclosing circle, so that we feel we might reach out and grasp that little world, take hold of the lost green place, of ...”

“... This is the first half of a survey of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The division into two quite slim volumes does not mean that Professor Pears accepts a received view: that the man had two philosophies. The split is practical. University courses are commonly about either Philosophical Investigations or Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1953 and 1921 respectively ...”

“... in telling such a story in the first place. In the film he is very sympathetically played by David Calder: this may be truer to Charles Wood’s screenplay than to life. There is no hint in this portrayal of the boorishness which never seems far from the surface of his own account. His wife, Jean Lawrence, is a shadowy presence in both book and film. She ...”

“... solutions. These may have few advantages: the re-design of the Guardian by a typographer (David Hillman) has resulted in a gawkier paper than the one the suave types at the Independent produce. Printing has produced most of its own best historians – Blades, Morison, Updike. Perhaps it is a sign of the growing division between reading and designing ...”

“... on civilians and civilian targets, were routine. After one such attack on 9 September 1993, Major David Stockwell, a UN spokesman, said that ‘there are no sidelines or spectator seats – the people on the ground are considered combatants.’ Col Trinquier would have been proud. Later, one of Stock-well’s colleagues justified detention of Somalis without ...”

“... or the Interior Department, there would have been an audible growl of satisfaction. The Nazi David Duke, it doesn’t pay to forget, got a clear majority of the white vote in the gubernatorial race in Louisiana. And several of the new conservative intake of the Senate and House have made either electoral or political pacts with members of the militia ...”

“... was held in the same year, at the University of London. Studies by Peter Fryer, James Walvin and David Dabydeen appeared in the next few years. Fryer, whose Staying Power is still the most detailed – and most often consulted – account of the subject, gave more than two hundred talks and lectures at adult education centres, schools and public meetings ...”

“... patrician of next-century information capitalism, Gates has been talking to everyone, including David Letterman, about what the future – guided by Microsoft, its controlling partner – has in store. With his transformation into a Third Wave Pollyanna, Chairman Bill is sounding remarkably like Speaker Newt, and his new book The Road Ahead has much in ...”