“... required that the actual source of motive power be obscured. Fressoz acknowledges his debt to David Edgerton, who argued in The Shock of the Old (2006) that we do not understand modernity because of our fixation on innovation and our lack of interest in the way systems of production operate. Accounts of contemporary reality organised around technological ...”

“... to think that Boris Johnson’s wife, Carrie, was a dysfunctional presence in Number 10, and that David Cameron had performed a sex act on a pig, can be said to be many things, but a secretive wirepuller is not one of them.Reeves and Friedman​ allege that the wealth elite ‘tilts strongly to the right’. The comparison is with the rest of their Who’s ...”

“... which had allowed them to produce six classic films in six years. The Hollywood moguls David O. Selznick and Sam Goldwyn were less successful partners: Gone to Earth (1950), a Hardyesque pastoral, became a bizarre vehicle for Selznick’s wife, Jennifer Jones; The Elusive Pimpernel (1950) was recut by Goldwyn, who demanded straight adventure and ...”

“... or that its history mirrors that of Jewish migrations, is a trope of modern antisemitism. As David Nirenberg put it in Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), the association of Judaism with worldliness and money is ‘as ancient as Christianity itself’. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, the period covered by Bethencourt, European long-distance ...”

“... the last twenty years. Labour was well ahead of the Conservatives in the polls. The Tory leader, David Cameron, was in a difficult phase, no longer a fresh figure after a year and a half in charge, and facing growing internal opposition to his liberalisation strategy. Brown, long regarded at Westminster and by the media as a ruthless operator, was widely ...”

“... back is as dry as the Mojave, ready. Cranston’s comedy is to be a half-step ahead of the beat, David Duchovny’s to be a half-step behind. In a moving car this balances, like when you perfectly pace a moving walkway so it appears to be standing still. In their silences they are talking about ambition, acknowledging strengths and weaknesses, they are ...”

“... through the gamuts for them all. And there was a martyred boy who stood in the bitter wind outside David Greig’s, his blue hands full of cracked eggs. For him I nursed an uplifting passion. I’m not sure that I didn’t rejoice in his suffering as a means to my salvation. Autobiography is an act of self-love, and Barker seems to have none. No more does she ...”

“... Has Labour ever had a decent leader? Has not the conjunction of circumstance always ensured that the right man in the right place at the right time was, ineluctably, the wrong man? Or has there, perhaps, never been a ‘right’ man (or woman): is it in the nature of British working-class politics that those who come to the fore are always those who, as the saying goes, could scarcely organise a piss-up in a brewery? The Edwardian pioneers had no settled leader (the SDP has sound scriptural precedent here): Keir Hardie’s talents were other than those of a Parliamentary chairman; Arthur Henderson was dull; Ramsay MacDonald was both great orator and skilled tactician, though his critics within the Party were numerous well before the First World War broke out ...”

“... now admired as a kind of wartime reincarnation of Christopher Smart. Gurney trained as a musician, David Jones and Isaac Rosenberg as artists; they all served in the ranks and were excluded from the mainstream of literary life after the war – Rosenberg was dead, Gurney mad, Jones given to arcane pursuits. Once again, it was the public school volunteer ...”

“... possibility that some riots may be modelled on the carnival or Saturnalia, that they may be fun. David Matza claimed some years ago, in his book Delinquency and Drift, that criminologists have taken delinquency rather too seriously, casting it as the fateful pursuit of those intent on profit or a grim lawlessness. He claimed that since Frederick Thrasher ...”

“... Israeli poet), Yehuda Amichai, Leah Goldberg, Moshe Dor, Shlomo Viner, Dahlia Ravikovitch and David Vogel; Oxford have published Amichai and Carcanet Pagis; Tony Rudolf and Howard Schwarz have recently edited an enormous volume of modern Jewish poetry, which includes a 300-page section on Hebrew poetry.* All these, of course, are in English only. But some ...”

“... as an achievement of humane anxiety. The performance Hitchcock received from Tippi Hedren – in David Thomson’s words, ‘an actress’s triumph as well as a director’s’ – gives body and voice to the ambivalence about others which is at the heart of the work of this fearful man.The most interesting things to have come out since Hitchcock’s death ...”

“... that obedience to natural law means ‘that every man shall pursue his own happiness’ (echo of David Hume and foretaste of Bentham himself?). The puzzle is rather, as Ross Harrison suggests in his discussion of Bentham’s thought as a whole – a considerable achievement – why Bentham did not enlist natural law as an ally of utility: they had much in ...”

“... as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ‘Brooklynese speech’. But at least it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is – a ‘companion’, not a history. I wish I could say the same for the season’s lot of general surveys, which look so authoritative to the ...”

“... the same temperament that made him such excellent company and such a skilled social engineer. As David Brewster wrote in the 19th century, he ‘was a man of the world, much esteemed in society’. He seems to have been one of those who would rather lose a job than a joke. He told one scientific colleague who declined to drink with him on a Friday that he ...”