“... was anecdotal evidence of abuse of the present system by a handful of asylum-seekers; but, as David Heath MP pointed out, the normal way of dealing with abuse of a system is to put an end to the abuse, not the system. Only the year before, a high-speed process of statutory review by the High Court had been instituted. In the course of an unusually loud ...”

“... to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.’ In Consciousness and the Novel (2002), David Lodge quotes V.S. Ramachandran describing the need ‘to reconcile the first person and third person accounts of the universe’ as ‘the single most important problem in science’. Lodge goes on to argue that novels – particularly novels written in ...”

“... forged a letter to get a portrait of Byron from his publisher John Murray. In her history, Lord David Cecil wrote, ‘side-by-side run always two stories, what happened to Caroline and what she pretended had happened.’ With her there was, too, a wider than usual gulf between precepts and practice. She told Murray that the only rules necessary for a safe ...”

“... Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip ...”

“... Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.’ And again, in Constance Garnett’s much ...”

“... a Libyan tribe that controlled virtually all trans-Saharan trade. Recent British fieldwork, led by David Mattingly, has demonstrated that this civilisation, in an area where average annual rainfall is less than 10 mm, practised intensive agriculture supported by qanats (locally called foggaras): underground tunnels that tapped an aquifer in the slopes of an ...”

“... the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered the secret world ‘in the spirit of John Buchan and left it in the spirit of Kafka’; allowing for quite a lot of exaggeration at both ends, it’s a reasonable comment on The Spy who Came in from the ...”

“... on existentialism and phenomenology edited by R.D. Laing, complete with a eulogistic preface by David Cooper (the South African-born psychiatrist who coined the term ‘anti-psychiatry’). But readers who have to rely on an English translation have had to wait almost four decades to get their hands on a complete version. In important respects the new ...”

“... Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like a chamberpot with holes and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s ...”

“... up an overpass would be perfectly apt. Birk has got at the parts of LA that recall Piranesi, not David Hockney, the sinister noir terrain of freeway overpasses and cuttings and drainage ditches that create a stacked-up, tangled vertical landscape far from the flat, sunshiny LA of the usual iconography. In some ways, the writhing full-page illustrations are ...”

“... offensive that this should be the only description of that marvellous novel. Stevenson uses David Lodge’s image of contemporary literary production as ‘an aesthetic supermarket’ in which an ‘astonishing variety of styles’ are on offer, and links this with Malcolm Bradbury’s similar picture of ‘a great shopping mall world of ...”

“... are not variable confessions but different worlds, and different instruments of understanding. David Kepesh in The Dying Animal offers a strong sidelight on Roth in The Plot against America, a comic view of liberty and nation which darkens and widens in the new novel. Kepesh, divorced and determined never to make the mistake of marriage again, takes true ...”

“... to the Young Muslim Organisation. Operating from the East London mosque, its members ran kung fu classes and football tournaments; they put up posters and wore T-shirts advertising their Islamic identity. Several had been in prison or belonged to gangs. Husain writes that the YMO was ‘as bad and cool as the other street gangs, just without the ...”

“... cent of available water is used for the sole benefit of Israeli cities and settlements. At Camp David in 2000, when Ehud Barak negotiated the future of the Temple Mount compound with Arafat, Clinton favoured another ‘soft’ solution, giving Palestinians full sovereignty over the mosques on the Temple Mount, while Israel would have full sovereignty under ...”

“... the Canadian forests. He talks to Mayor Larry Campbell of Vancouver, and also to the extraordinary David Soares, district attorney of Albany, who has set out to reverse New York State’s Rockefeller Laws, which impose ferocious penalties for possession of minute quantities of drugs. The point here is that Canada is inclined to decriminalise, while the US ...”