“... 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 ...”

“... Pilgrimage of Grace (1996) and The Defeat of the Pilgrimage of Grace (1999), which he wrote with David Bownes. But to say that Hoyle shares with other historians what Bishop Sheppard of Liverpool called a bias, if not towards the poor then towards the people, a trendy bias, is not to say that he is wrong, or even that his history is prejudicial. On the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for the Greeks death brings sadness and pain. In a wonderful reading of the Biblical stories of David, and of Esau and Jacob, Josipovici rightly emphasises the theological restraint – what might be called the thematic restraint – of these stories, which do not exist to incarnate moral lessons so much as to present complex and contradictory characters ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a similar culture. Husain now thinks that Hizb ut-Tahrir should be banned; in this, he agrees with David Cameron, who is upset by Gordon Brown’s refusal to follow up on his predecessor’s promise to eradicate it. In an email sent to various news organisations after reviews of The Islamist began to appear, Hizb ut-Tahrir said that Husain’s experience in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I have only recently discovered and who was not known to my father or, I think, to his. This is David ben Elizer, who some time in the late 18th or early 19th century took the name Laquer, which soon acquired another u. This rabbi, who seems to have been a man of considerable learning, secular as well as religious, spent his whole life in a tiny village now ...”

“... paraphrase, of the seven penitential psalms and the opening chapters of Ecclesiastes. King David was believed to be the author of those psalms, his son Solomon of Ecclesiastes: two deeply flawed monarchs with whom Henry VIII identified. For Wyatt there were self-imposed limits. Verse was about what could not be achieved in the real world. ‘He was ...”