“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... shtetl Jew endeavouring simply to subsist’.The marriage became even more strained after Meir met David Remez, director of the public works office of the Histadrut, who helped her get a job at the Women Workers’ Council in Tel Aviv. She took the children to live there, leaving Morris in Jerusalem. Meir’s affair with Remez lasted for two decades, until his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Inquiry which that trial provoked. He followed the Hutton Inquiry into the government scientist David Kelly’s suicide and the ‘sexed-up’ intelligence dossier on Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq War. He dissected the grotesquely delayed Chilcot Report, which described how the Blair government blundered into that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... form of a polemic against the idea of social democracy. The target is not the social democracy of David Owen and the SDP, an explicitly non-socialist politics of the left, but social democracy used in its proper historical sense to encompass all the non-revolutionary and non-Communist socialist parties of the industrial world, or what in the classical Marxist ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wrecking the economy? It looked hopeless. In his fine book The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (2009), David Welsh asked: ‘How could two such opposed organisations as the ANC and the NP ever hope to reach a constitutional settlement, given their respective histories, their radically different constitutional proposals, and a serious difference of opinion over the ...”

“... black and white photographs that line the walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a nightmare mix of half-forgotten careerists and political ...”

“... that surrounds discussions of sexual conduct, whether risky and deviant or not. When I spoke to David Attenborough he was amazed to hear that someone he knew might have been named by others as part of the scene surrounding Gamlin at All Souls Place. I don’t hesitate to believe him: he clearly knew nothing about it. Others saw much more than he did and can ...”