“... from adult cells, the conclusion that adult mammals could not be cloned, a journalistic hoax (David Rorvik’s announcement that he had helped a wealthy eccentric clone himself), a brilliant experimentalist (Karl Illmensee) accused of faking results, and, finally, a small band of mavericks working outside the prestigious centres of biotechnology in the ...”

“... of a man facing a huge breathtaking vista of mountains, mist and sun, a version of Caspar David Friedrich’s Traveller above the Sea of Clouds. A closer look tells us that this man is engaged in painting the railing in front of him, and just now standing back to survey his handiwork. In several different countries, Cartier-Bresson will show two or ...”

“... off as a ‘dull’ decade, repeating the clichéd and inaccurate suggestion that until Elizabeth David published her Book of Mediterranean Food no British person had used olive oil except as a cure for earache. Craxton, however, found England both dull and cold and from now on spent as much time as he could in Greece, where he faced the ‘unending ...”

“... the government put de Kooning’s Woman III up for sale. It was sold to the American billionaire David Geffen, and the proceeds were used to buy pages of the Houghton Shahnameh, a particularly magnificent edition of the Persian Book of Kings, that had been taken apart and sold as single leaves by a collector in the 1970s. The purchase satisfied nobody. Some ...”

“... some point before the late 1630s it was damaged and cut down, and is now known through copies by David Teniers the Younger, but in its time it was an important step towards the most significant development of Venetian public art, the sacra conversazione, where divine, sainted and human figures participate, as apparent equals, in a single narrative in a ...”

“... Baltimore has been to crime what 19th-century London was to poverty. This is due in large part to David Simon, once a Baltimore Sun reporter himself, whose books Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighbourhood (written with Ed Burns) were both turned into TV programmes, and fed into his most successful ...”

“... But the rest he can take or leave. In May 1902, he visits the Louvre and is unimpressed by David and Velázquez. He mistakes Chardin’s eggs for onions. ‘Nothing here means anything to me.’ As he leaves the museum he sees a blackbird, poised against a wall of green, which eclipses all the paintings he has seen. On paying a visit to Monet’s water ...”

“... much time in the city of Cluj, where she had formed a passionate friendship with the historian David Prodan. The Securitate meanwhile had decided that with a name like Verdery she must be an ethnic Hungarian (quite wrong: the family roots were French), and therefore had been planted to encourage subversion among the disaffected Magyar minority in ...”

“... neck’ (Roger Shattuck); ‘Sun neck cut’ (Beverley Bie Brahic); ‘Let the sun beheaded be’ (David Lehman); ‘Sun sundered head’ (Martin Sorrell); ‘Sun throat cut’ (Ron Padgett). The compression of this lurid image of the dawn must have greatly appealed to Beckett; indeed his streamlined version possibly takes its cue from the phrase, for it ...”

“... they hear on the news. While they drive, the family listen to Kendrick Lamar, Laurie Anderson and David Bowie. The couple seem like cool parents who will raise charming and precocious children; their break-up just adds to their refusal to adhere to convention. One day, in a bookshop, the narrator finds herself staring at the photograph of a male author on a ...”

“... it was and by spending as much money as possible in service of that goal.I met another architect, David Waggonner, who for the last ten years has been attempting to show that there is another way of doing things. His firm’s water management plan for New Orleans is founded on the argument that the water has to be accepted and accommodated, as it is in places ...”

“... endowed by Thomas Kaplan and his wife, Dafna Recanati, and were designed with input from General David Petraeus, the disgraced former head of the CIA. Kaplan made his billions investing in Bolivian silver mines, African gold and platinum and US natural gas. He is the head of Tigris Financial Group and Electrum Group, in which the Emirati and other Gulf ...”

“... vaccination sites. In recent weeks there has been a new spin on the needles debate, provided by David Gisselquist. He heads a group of American academics who conducted a survey of various epidemiological studies of HIV, which they combined with the proposal that levels of sexual activity in Africa can be roughly equated with those in America and ...”

“... powerful TV executives led him to become the editor of World in Action and then the producer for David Frost, both current affairs institutions. Still in his mid-twenties, Birt breathed tear gas while filming demonstrations, had a gun pointed at him in Bangladesh, and set up interviews in South Wales with implacable striking miners – by 1972 he felt he was ...”

“... to underpaid public servants and buys off dissidents – consider Harold Pinter’s recent CH, or David Hare’s K. Conversely, the Royals are happy to benefit from the disrepute into which democratic politics habitually brings itself. This is particularly useful when, as now, politicians’ mendacity and self-interest meets with public ‘cynicism’ and the ...”