“... liberation movement decided to negotiate before he had won.’ But when Nelson Mandela’s ANC and F.W. de Klerk’s ruling white National Party sat down at Kempton Park in April 1993 to begin what was called the Multi-Party Negotiation Process (MPNP), representatives of 24 other parties sat down with them, each with its own agenda. All were highly suspicious ...”

“... hair and a big beard, and playing the iconoclast in public, not least in an appearance on the David Letterman Show in 1986, where he seemed to be not only dead drunk but crazy. You can find it on YouTube. He died in 2003, at the age of eighty. Phillips was ridiculed throughout his life for selling Elvis Presley’s contract to RCA for $40,000, given what ...”

“... The most inspiring example can currently be found in human geography. Marxist geographers such as David Harvey emphasise that buildings and land are the products of capitalist elites, while the late Doreen Massey argued that space ‘is always in the process of being made’, by people as much as by capital. She showed how ordinary people could produce their ...”

“... Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books,’ David Dumville wrote in 1977; and he was backed up by, for instance, J.N.L. Myres in 1986: ‘No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.’ In his new book, Nicholas Higham cites neither opinion but certainly ...”

“... to play fifty years ago) were also billed, alongside veterans from the founding festival: Santana, David Crosby, Country Joe McDonald, the remains of the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat and others. But Lang’s fifty-up began to unravel when his top-dog investor, the Japanese digicoms company Dentsu Aegis, announced from its London HQ that it was pulling ...”

“... The might-have-been may offer ‘the perfume of the possible’, as it does for Prendergast in David Lean’s film Brief Encounter. This is quite different from what he calls ‘the cheap fragrance splashed all over’ Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, which becomes Prendergast’s shorthand for feckless or footling counterfactual thinking. He doesn’t want ...”

“... decipherer’s childhood: one of the most brilliant of the American decipherers of Mayan glyphs, David Stuart, was already drawing them at the age of eight, when he went on a trip to the Yucatán with his parents. Childhood is, or anyway was in my cryptophile generation, a time for slipping conspiratorially in and out of the linguistic disguise of some code ...”

“... he sold the family home to pay off his gambling debts. Then in 1978, the influential solicitor Sir David Napley, having seen Carman mesmerise a jury in a closing speech, decided to brief him to defend Jeremy Thorpe in one of the biggest criminal trials of the decade. Thorpe, the urbane Old Etonian leader of the Liberal Party, had been accused of conspiring to ...”

“... of her time at Cambridge that she got her own first ‘dusty answer’. She fell for the dashing David Keswick, who seemed so ‘very, very smitten’ that after one kiss she knew they would be together for ever. She was devastated when he explained he had been engaged to somebody else for years. She renounced love and made a short, disastrous marriage on ...”

“... comics and the like could be made to serve some of the goals set for high art from Rembrandt and David to Rothko and Barnett Newman: not only pictorial unity and dramatic focus, but also ‘significant form’ (as Roger Fry and Clive Bell urged) and ‘the integrity of the picture plane’ (the vaunted ‘flatness’ demanded of Modernist painting by Clement ...”

“... a one-tome definition of what the American novel (for good or ill) so often seeks to be nowadays. David Foster Wallace and Kurt Anderson step aside: today’s big novel is the type of book which aims at bigness with the notion that all other big books are folded inside. The example is not War and Peace but the World Wide Web. The Corrections chimes with a ...”

“... often repeated tic: Yakimov’s wearyingly reiterated obsession with food and drink; the diplomat David Boyd’s snigger-cum-snuffle. The high-budget TV version brought the best out of the books. Alan Plater’s adroit screenplay, though it runs for six hours, removed almost all repetitions and longueurs. More, it gave interpretative shape to what, though not ...”

“... on in interviews with ‘His Excellency’ by Bob Astles. Long after the publication in 1974 of David Martin’s General Amin might have been expected to bring some constraint, Fleet Street went on with the joke – spiced as it was with prurient pleasure in a wickedness hard to credit, completely, in the security of somewhere far away across the world. The ...”

“... For most people, I suspect, the name of Régis Debray is still inextricably linked with that of Che Guevara. For many, it still conjures up a blissful time of youthful certainties and heroic purpose. Debray was one of the first to do what many later dreamt of doing. In 1961, as a 20-year-old philosophy student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he visited Cuba in the aftermath of the Revolution ...”

“... even mention the word ‘Conservative’. This had worked in 1918, when a coalition led by David Lloyd George, ‘the man who won the war’, and including the Tories, secured an electoral landslide.Not this time. Churchill rendered Attlee a great service with his disgraceful broadcast warning that a Labour government wouldn’t allow free expression ...”