“... most of his readers will take to be basic human rights. We have only to look at Michelangelo’s David, carved for the revived Florentine Republic in 1504, to know what it felt like to be rid of the Medici, and to appreciate the civic spirit their dynasty had subdued with its sinister charm. Florentine civic spirit, like that of ancient Athens, was largely ...”

“... from the outside is what drives The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Frankenstein, or the films of David Lynch. To watch yourself from outside is, according to the textbook, to watch yourself as dead – and both Hall and his hero understand this all too well. Holed up in his flat, Eric Sanderson reads letter after letter sent to him by ‘the First Eric ...”

“... out of a difficult life is an idea that some moderns have endorsed. In his ‘Essay on Suicide’, David Hume thought it would be strange for God to deny us an option that even a malaria mosquito could inflict; Georges Poulet disagreeably proclaimed that death by one’s own hand is the only act that avoids the twin perils of a meaningless existence and a ...”

“... no more idea of how he came up with snail porridge than Michelangelo understood how he produced David (which is not to declare the two creations of equal worth). Peter Conrad enters what he sees as an unfashionable plea for the idea of artistic genius; but genius can be found all over the place. Paul McCartney has a touch of genius, and so do many people ...”

“... When the borders of the realm were again threatened in 1940, Churchill invoked it. It is David and Goliath, island v. empire, a ‘weak and feeble woman’ against a king with a God complex. Philip’s failure to heed the warnings and alter his course made him the architect of his own downfall. His confident hope of a miracle left bodies on the ...”

“... the Birmingham Trojan Horse hoax.)In response to the Tower Hamlets case, the then prime minister, David Cameron, asked his ‘anti-corruption champion’, Eric Pickles, to look into electoral fraud. The subsequent report acknowledged its debt to Mawrey – ‘the judgment of Richard Mawrey QC was one of the reference points for this review,’ Pickles ...”

“... shall stand/With its unshaken head, till time’s last sand.’ This last phrase was borrowed by David Kynaston for the title of his captivating history of the bank.* The exit of the deputy governor remained unequalled for drama until the resignation of another deputy governor during the Barings crash three centuries later, after a Sunday tabloid reported ...”

“... defeat. An honest review of the record casts the British naval leadership in a very poor light. As David Lloyd George explained in his memoirs, ‘before the War, the Board of Admiralty had concentrated so much on big and still bigger ships that they neglected essential weapons like mines, armour-piercing shells and torpedoes – all of which were inferior to ...”

“... a revitalised Border Command. He has been reticent about immigration targets, which helped undo David Cameron. For liberal politicians, migration is a zugzwang: a state in which action is unavoidable, but any action makes the situation worse. Aggressive migration policies imperil the cheap labour on which Britain depends (especially in its health and care ...”

“... of 31 January 2003, when Blair met Bush at the White House. According to the Chilcot Report, David Manning, the British ambassador in Washington, noted that the two men agreed that ‘the military campaign could begin “around 10 March”.’ As I wrote in my book Lawless World: Making and Breaking Global Rules (2006), the note actually states that 10 ...”

“... he acts, has already ceded his victim too much power. ‘Honour,’ Lama Abu-Odeh writes, citing David Gilmore, ‘is not only what women must keep intact to remain alive, but what men should defend fiercely so as not to be reduced to women.’ ‘We are men,’ the killers in Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers say, ‘but she reduced us to eunuch bystanders by ...”

“... the nature of the relationship between God and the Israelites. Captives are kept barefoot, and David fled barefooted from his son Absalom. Subjugation and unreadiness, therefore, are signified, and we’re reminded, perhaps, of the prelapsarian honeymoon when Adam and Eve were butt naked in the garden and God didn’t have the bother of providing them with ...”

“... betrayed him to the local sheriff in Oklahoma), and Stash disappeared altogether. Even the amiable David, a Californian draft dodger and pacifist who lounged about the flat in an Easy Rider fringed jacket and cowboy boots, came back some nights with bleeding knuckles from pub fights he swore he hadn’t started. A commune has a natural life, and ours was ...”

“... dualism is untenable. The best way through Clark’s book is to start by reading the foreword by David Chalmers and the paper by Clark and Chalmers that is reprinted as an appendix. These are short, informal presentations of the so-called ‘Extended Mind Thesis’ (EMT), of which the rest of the book is an elaboration and discussion. Here, then, is a ...”

“... am a young radical who wants to show the value to the left of writing from this period.’ David Norbrook’s Writing the English Republic is the summation of this movement. Norbrook wants there to be a republican cultural moment in the mid-17th century. For him the ‘Horatian Ode’ is not bipolar, as it is for Worden: it is a committed republican ...”