“... with Dr Johnson a growing taste for history writing that eschewed the ‘huge canvasses’ of David Hume in favour of more intimate details ‘applicable to private life’, the emerging streets and houses and the evidence of ‘customs and manners’ which were at the same time both ancient and familiar, transformed the experience of visitors. Hamilton ...”

“... as the major channel into this country for the theories of the European Enlightenment – or so David Watkin’s generous reading of Soane’s muddled (and, at the time, scarcely audible) Royal Academy lectures would suggest. These rival claims to Soane’s legacy are neatly captured, and subverted, in a cartoon currently on show in Sir John Soane’s ...”

“... hooligans: members of West Ham’s Inter City Firm launched the pirate radio station Centreforce FM). But Gillett complicates the story. He points out that dance music didn’t suddenly arrive in Britain in 1987; house, imported from Chicago a few years earlier, already had a following, particularly in Northern hotspots like Blackburn and Manchester. The ...”

“... dissidents and sometimes collaborators, not survivors of labour and concentration camps. (David Nasaw’s The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War, published in 2020, pays close attention to the way the distinctive character of Jewish suffering was effaced as American churches or charities began lobbying on behalf of ...”

“... party, both started out as ‘terrorists’. Begin was behind the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed nearly a hundred civilians; Shamir planned the 1948 kidnapping and assassination of the UN representative Folke Bernadotte. Yitzhak Rabin, revered among liberal Zionists as a peacemaker, oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of ...”

“... any memory of his existence’ and so changed her son’s name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel: ‘Hamel’ was the name of her next husband; she wanted to preserve the ‘J.D.’, but the Donald had to go. He’s only been known as ‘J.D. Vance’ – sometimes with dots, sometimes without – since 2014, when he changed his name to honour ...”

“... to the flinty Wyeth’s credit, this overture was rebuffed.’ Nearer home, there was the case of David Sylvester, perhaps the leading British art critic of the second half of the 20th century. Hughes valued him as a friend and a fine analyst; he was also the best exhibition installer of his time. But he was a very slow writer with ‘an indurated ...”

“... later,New York was a far different city on this day than it was when he assumed the mayoralty from David Dinkins … You could read it in the numbers and feel it in the streets.Crime was down nearly 60 per cent. The murder rate was even lower; 1250 fewer New Yorkers were killed in 2000 than in 1993. Car thieves stole more than 111,000 vehicles the year before ...”

“... unpaid sovereign debt, and the supply-chain financing tycoon Lex Greensill, who hired David Cameron to lobby the UK government for business and was later disgraced and bankrupted.The biggest Vision Fund bet was WeWork – essentially a real estate company that leased commercial buildings in big cities, fixed them up with communal ...”

“... Kyemba, who spun tales of Amin as a cannibal and killer, including of his own wives and children. David Owen, foreign secretary under James Callaghan, compared him to Pol Pot; he also looked into the possibility of having Amin assassinated.But Ugandan Asians are a poor fit as victims. For a start, the expulsion meant different things to different people. For ...”

“... up to be associated with it. Many of the military leaders of the First World War – Douglas Haig, David Beatty and Hamilton – were there, under the distant and autocratic leadership of Herbert Kitchener. The other great difference in 1898 was that there was no risk of repeating Gambier-Parry’s confusion of 1884. Every soldier and every newspaper reader ...”

“... might pass as an intellectual.The extravagant praise these men inspire can be a little creepy. David Foster Wallace described watching Federer as a ‘near-religious experience’, but even he couldn’t have anticipated the levels of idolatry in The Roger Federer Effect. The book brings together interviews with friends, fans and nodding acquaintances ...”

“... mutual recognition. The names of friends float through the book like a sociable chorus – Sophia, David, Maeve. The tangles of inner life are modified, and sometimes untangled, by exchanges with these characters. Bennett sidesteps the slough of heteropessimism, though she provides grounds for it (all that male obtuseness, the ambient and sometimes enacted ...”

“... transformed in the second half of the 20th century. In the 1980s, the American palaeontologists David Raup and Jack Sepkoski revived catastrophism by building an inventory of fossil data and showing that mass extinctions seem to occur roughly every 26 million years – those spikes on the graph of numbers of taxa plotted as a function of time. Their ...”