“... art can make and the support it can give to bad government are evident in Bell’s treatment of David (‘this cheerleader-cum-weathervane’) and the Death of Marat. He tracks its ‘terse, glare-lit, blocked-off pictorial space’ back to Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi, and the genre, the martyr-portrait, to religious art: ‘...”

“... with enthusiasm in 1984-85, as more rough and ready activists, reminiscent of the ‘denims’ in David Peace’s miners’ strike novel, GB84. But Gildea’s history of community mobilisation challenges the Conservatives’ depiction of unionised miners as a threat to democracy, Thatcher’s ‘enemy within’.Raymond Williams thought that the ...”

“... Jean​ Jaurès was a deserving child of the French republican meritocracy. An outstanding pupil from the town of Castres, near Toulouse, he came top in the entrance exam for the École Normale Supérieure, where he specialised in philosophy. In 1885, at the age of 25, he was elected as a Republican deputy for his home town. During his first term in the National Assembly, Jaurès worked on two theses for his doctorate at the Sorbonne, one in French and the other in Latin ...”

“... is deployed in a more realist setting, and more relentlessly. Reading it, I was reminded of David Shields’s remark that with most conventional novels, ‘you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written.’ Here the key term is, once again, ‘the future’, a quantity that the ...”

“... many also discreetly own private islands. On the West Coast, the yacht-owning Hollywood moguls David Geffen and Steven Spielberg are joined by tech billionaires including Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Alphabet’s Sergey Brin and his former colleague Eric Schmidt. Microsoft’s Paul Allen owned one, as does Charles Simonyi. The tech-bros have grown their ...”

“... across the globe was always part of domestic life.’ In an appendix to Ornamentalism (2001), David Cannadine described the way his father, who had been stationed overseas during World War Two, ‘talked endlessly about India’. Unlike Hall and Cannadine, Bernard Porter remembered the empire coming up rarely during his childhood – no family connections ...”

“... chaplain, no less); John Hull the piper with Alison, a blood relative of his former wife; David Webbe with Eve Elvell. Most of them were reported to be ‘outside’ the parish; that is, beyond the reach of the bishop’s crozier. But one more thing, reverend father: ‘John, chaplain, as it seems to them, is not firm in his faith, because he has ...”

“... risk of trauma. Edmund Burke, the greatest Irish political thinker, held this view, and so did David Hume, who writes in A Treatise of Human Nature that in the origins of every nation we find rebellion and usurpation, which the passage of time will make appear just and reasonable. This means among other things that such a revolution, duly repressed, is ...”

“... bore sacred images in precisely that space. Readers working their way through the book could watch David or Job, the suffering Christ, the Virgin or the Trinity drawing nearer or receding from them as they prayed. Manuscripts bear telltale signs of their use. In fact, book historians love the sloppy readers who would have pained librarians of old. Marginal ...”

“... unknown to science. The first European to describe it was the French Catholic missionary Armand David, who saw the skin of a black and white bear on display in a house in western China in 1869. He contracted some local hunters to capture and kill one, and sent the body back to Paris so it could be scientifically described. Taxonomists started arguing about ...”

“... Kulturkritik and the Marxian investigations of finance capital carried out by Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey. One trait of postmodernism unmentioned by Jameson was the special difficulty critics and thinkers of recent generations have experienced in conveying their thoughts except through the medium of someone else’s; intellectuals today tend to offer ...”

“... far from one-eyed. Initially, the new party, in a semi-formal alliance with the Liberals led by David Steel, enjoyed a heady surge of popularity. A Gallup poll in December 1981 put the Tories on 23 per cent, Labour on 24, and the new Alliance on 51. Jenkins triumphantly re-entered Parliament by winning Glasgow Hillhead in March 1982, but the Alliance’s ...”

“... of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in 2015, including Thomas Piketty and David Blanchflower (who tweeted ‘he has no economic policies’). Corbyn’s former policy chief, Neale Coleman, who was often described as the most effective member of his team, has now been announced as a top adviser to his opponent in the leadership ...”

“... Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, David Skal and Elias Savada recount the casting process for Freaks: In a Montreal sideshow, scouts discovered Johnny Eckhardt … a startling ‘half-boy’ whose body ended below the ribcage. The armless, legless Prince Randian was a native of British Guiana who ...”

“... Emily Brontë poems. Fred was even worse: in 1913 he wrote three novels in eight months – David Blaize, The Freaks of Mayfair and Mike. In the last three years of his life he managed eight books. Of his ‘masterpiece’ As We Were (1932), his modern biographer observes deadpan: ‘Significantly, the manuscript demonstrates that Fred took greater care ...”