“... liquid bottle (‘cleans, no added promises’) on a fire. Words rear up and loom enormous – David Cameron, for example, may find this with his plan for ‘thrifty government’ – and fizz and collapse and make a nasty smell. It is, I take it, obvious that one of the many things no one particularly needs at the moment is a book that tells you how to ...”

“... A Transparent Novel (2004) touches on similar questions. It’s about another public performance, David Blaine’s 44 days living without food in a Perspex box suspended over the Thames. One girl is convinced that the box is made of glucose: ‘When he thinks nobody’s looking, can’t you see the bastard licking?’ Other onlookers call him ‘a fake, a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... white man, vote for me, and even that Sanders implicitly conveyed that message. The Vox journalist David Roberts did a word-frequency analysis on Clinton’s campaign speeches and concluded that she mostly talked about workers, jobs, education and the economy, exactly the things she was berated for neglecting. She mentioned jobs almost 600 ...”

“... his presciently titled book (Bush had not yet loosed his thunderbolt when the MS was completed), David Victor of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, calls it ‘the Kyoto fantasyland’, and in retrospect there was never a chance of a workable agreement. But the Kyoto delegates believed they had two precedents to hearten them. In 1985 Joe ...”

“... him, however, and Watt was charged with high treason, along with an elderly goldsmith called David Downie, who was unfortunate enough to be at the meeting at which Watt disclosed his crackpot plan. The government was keen to persuade the jury and public opinion (though it was certainly not true) that the Edinburgh plot was part of a co-ordinated ...”

“... much heart.Reitlinger devotes a substantial number of pages to Eichmann and concludes, in a phrase David Cesarani quotes, that Eichmann’s ‘career was that of a German civil servant, absorbed in his work and getting no glory for it’. Reitlinger didn’t fail to recognise his significance in the murder of millions of Jews but, like Arendt later on, he ...”

“... rather than padlock themselves to the gates of Downing Street. Strangest of all, in September 2015 David Cameron wrote to the Conservative leader of Oxfordshire County Council to complain about cuts it had recently announced: I was disappointed at the long list of suggestions floated in the briefing note to make up significant cuts to frontline services ...”

“... across their ancient homeland. Hämäläinen relates the account given to the English explorer David Thompson by one of the Blackfeet Indians, Saahkómaapi. In around 1730, the Blackfeet heard that there were horses in Snake Indian country and that not far away was the body of a horse that had been killed by an arrow. They found the dead horse and gathered ...”

“... associated. The purge of 1519, for instance, which has so engrossed Gwyn’s bête noire David Starkey, was ‘a storm in a tea-cup’. The truth, pronounces Gwyn, is that the political world of Wolsey’s ascendancy was ‘not an environment where faction flourished’. It was nevertheless an environment where the Duke of Buckingham got his head ...”

“... unlawful – did so ‘spontaneously’, says MacGregor, or orchestrated by MacGregor’s Svengali David Hart, as others say – the new legislation demoralised the union, complicated its affairs, made its leaders look shifty as they tried to evade the sequestrators. But the two main battles owed nothing to it. In the physical battle for control of pits, power ...”

“... be attached to his intrepid voyage? Of the natives he first observed in ‘Hispaniola’, as David Brading’s book records, Colombo wrote: ‘They do not have arms and are all naked and with no ability for war and are very cowardly, so that a thousand could not resist three [Castilians] and thus they are fit to be commanded and made to work and to sow ...”

“... Israeli officials, for a man detained as a suspect in the killings of two Palestinians. The man, David Axelrod, is not related to Leon Trotsky. A man with the same name, who is a descendant of Trotsky, was questioned briefly by the police in a case of mistaken identity. The arcane character of this item, which was at the top of that day’s menu, might make ...”

“... already complied with it when they ceded a few thousand square miles of sand to Egypt in the Camp David Accords. Still, the West Bank and Gaza Strip today contain more than a million and a half Palestinians who, under international law and the rules of the United Nations, are clearly entitled to create their own national state, just as Israel was permitted to ...”