“... trouble in accepting the working classes as partners in running the country, from his co-option of David Kirkwood to help organise Labour in the First World War to his virtual delegation of labour relations to Ernest Bevin in the Second. His birth, background and personality made him far less sensitive to social nuances than most of his political ...”

“... in the New York Observer, headed ‘Twilight of the Great Literary Beasts’, Sven Birkerts and David Foster Wallace lament the decline in quality of the work produced by America’s greatest living straight white male novelists, citing Bellow, Mailer, Roth and Updike. Neither mentions Kurt Vonnegut, even though Wallace goes so far as to call the trio of ...”

“... applications, are even more seriously flawed than the data. One of the Minnesota researchers, David Lykken, wants to prevent low IQ mothers from having children (to ‘reduce the number of low IQ children’). This is, as the twin studied by Neubauer so nicely summed up that project, more ‘Nazi shit’. ‘A lot of social scientists are so scandalised ...”

“... whirlwind trip around European thought, with seven and a half pages on Hegel, one and a bit on David Hume and so on. The Monty Python ‘Summarise Proust’ contest, in which competitors had thirty seconds to deliver a précis, springs irresistibly to mind. Like the motion of desire itself, the book drives remorselessly from one author to another, raiding ...”

“... even married her Antony a good few times. The early stages of European portraiture began, the late David Piper suggested in his 1992 study, The English Face, with tomb-effigies in the 12th century. Neither beauty nor individuality were the point of these monuments in death to rank, wealth and piety. None of these portraits in stone looks like anyone I have ...”

“... Melbourne spent two winters in Glasgow, living plainly and studying with John Millar, disciple of David Hume and Adam Smith, and one of the most influential proselytisers for the Scottish Enlightenment. This experience gave him a strong commitment to the principles of political economy; it also profoundly influenced his thinking on the relationship between ...”

“... joined the web, you can’t leave.’In a 2008 interview for the Ballet Association, Scarlett told David Bain that he enjoyed his time at White Lodge ‘perhaps more than he should have’. He didn’t elaborate on what he meant by this. Scarlett won all the school’s choreographic prizes, and it was almost certainly this skill that gained him a place in the ...”

“... powers – ‘one of the worst and one of the most influential ideas around’, in the opinion of David Starkey in 2019. Hobbes describes it in Leviathan as ‘a doctrine, plainly, and directly against the essence of a Common-wealth … That the sovereign power may be divided. For what is it to divide the Power of a Common-wealth but to Dissolve it? For ...”

“... of Christoph Willibald Gluck, the sculpture of Antonio Canova and the paintings of Jacques-Louis David all aspired to this condition.Museums – and great art – were understood to give pleasure as well as instruction. The Enlightenment was concerned with the pursuit of happiness, not just for oneself but for everyone. The philosophes believed that the main ...”

“... had been frustrated by de Silva’s inability to compel witnesses to testify about the killing. David Cameron reneged on a government promise to set up an inquiry into Finucane’s murder. Stakeknife, who for 25 years was paid £80,000 a year by the British government, commanded the IRA’s internal security unit, known as the ‘nutting squad’, whose ...”

“... by a mob including, it was said, men in the livery of the secretary of state Henry Bolingbroke. David Edwards, the fugitive printer of the Memorial, was wise to lie low. It would have surprised Edwards to be told, while in hiding, that state censorship was a thing of the past, but for many years that is what historians of the period argued. In 1695 the ...”

“... wet-dream – The Martian School, The Metaphor Men. Who are they? Christopher Reid, perhaps? David Sweetman? Norman MacCaig? Philip Larkin? Seamus Heaney, perhaps? Doesn’t Heaney’s description of a lobster –articulated twigs, a rainy stonethe colour of sunk munitions –vie with Raine’sscraping its clawslike someone crouchedto keep wicket at ...”

“... in the late 1960s, are no longer central to his achievement. Cutting It Short isn’t the David Lodge novel that its English title seems to promise; indeed, one of the things that is to be docked – twice, and excruciatingly – by the heroine, who happens to be Hrabal’s mother, Marie, is the tail of a dog. This was the 1920s, and suddenly ...”

“... in the shape of That Was the Week That Was, which first aired on 24 November 1962, presented by David Frost. With the cancelling of that show little more than a year later, ostensibly on the grounds that it interfered with the BBC’s duty of impartiality in the run-up to the 1964 election, the heyday of anti-establishment comedy was already over. Yet its ...”

“... ritual: the project of ritual is to make time stand still, as it has apparently stood still in David Rodinsky’s room in the Princelet Street Synagogue since the day, twenty-odd years ago, when he disappeared. (See Tale No Five, ‘The Solemn Mystery of the Disappearing Room’; see also Patrick Wright’s account of Rodinsky’s room in the LRB of 29 ...”