“... Early 19th-century Edinburgh had a lot less time for James Hogg than for the Ettrick Shepherd, the literary persona created partly by Hogg himself, partly by the tight circle that ran Blackwood’s Magazine. Comic, bibulous, full of naive folk-wisdom, easy to patronise, the Ettrick Shepherd was invented as a souvenir of the pastoral Lowlands, a survival whose presence among one of the Edinburgh literary élites could represent both the continuity of modern Scots culture and the impolite past it had left behind ...”

“... occasionally parse but often convey no recoverable meaning? The alleged brilliance of these men David Halberstam once called ‘the best and the brightest’ is rarely in evidence. The discussions in the week before and the week after Kennedy’s quarantine speech had none of the intellectual rigour of proper debate, nor even the rough-and-tumble but ...”

“... structure founded by Great Britain’s defeat of the French Revolution. The scholarship of David Cannadine and Linda Colley has shown how this was done and how vital the monarchy was to the process. The rejigged royal institution was the mechanism for weening an unruly, half-revolutionary people away from its own past. The defeat of France shored up a ...”

“... eager to live, which meant running into the arms of the young. He found two new models: Sylvette David, a young woman with a blonde ponytail, and Paule de Lazerme, a black-haired ‘queen bee’. A different Gilot emerged too, stick thin, like ‘a Romanesque Christ’, embittered by what Picasso had turned her into:I had known from the start that what ...”

“... January, they have been managed by a new Task Force Europe, led by Johnson’s chief negotiator, David Frost, a burly, acerbic diplomat, one of the few in the Foreign Office who has always loathed the EU. Frost’s conversations with Michel Barnier have become openly bitter and recriminatory, in a way not seen before. Frost is backed up by contemptuous ...”

“... by American generals who had directed major operations in Iraq. Both Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus considered themselves experts in counterinsurgency – the respectable term for trying to suppress domestic resistance to a military occupation. British soldiers were supposed to fall in line with American thinking and avoid making too many ...”

“... he was more robust than Mr Earbrass. His ‘meticulous’ art boards, the production editor David Hough recalled, did not need editing and suggestions were not welcome. There was he said, ‘a bit of a ruckus’ over the hyphen in The Haunted Tea-Cosy.By 1963, successive changes of job and imprint had left Gorey stranded as an unhappy employee of ...”

“... removal of ruins and the burning of ancient marbles for lime. Other popes followed his example. As David Karmon showed some time ago, the movement to conserve ancient sites in their current state was born in the same years when antiquarians worried that Rome was consuming its own substance to fuel its revival.Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson tells the story ...”

“... Eva Hesse; Pop painters Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Vija Celmins; and the African American artists David Hammons and Glenn Ligon, who have applied stencilling to very different ends. Duchamp, Johns wrote, turned art ‘into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another’, but that lesson didn’t sink in until Johns reinforced it with his ...”

“... Lands on the favoured shelf: John S.C. Abbott’s The Terror of the Indians (or the Life of David Crockett), or Adventures in Field, Flood & Forest (Stories of Danger & Daring). These inspirational tales, intended for youths who might strike out for the colonies and malarial swamps, were ‘founded on the real experiences of those who figure in ...”

“... craft to folk culture, Catholic to Protestant everyday life. Heaney met the singer and filmmaker David Hammond in the ‘pre-Troubles, upbeat folk scene Belfast of the mid-1960s’; through him, and after the move to Dublin, he ‘got to know a lot of people, north and south, who were involved with traditional music’, among them Garech Browne of Claddagh ...”

“... melancholia’, ‘elite debacle’, ‘capitalist realism’, to name just a few.The historian David Edgerton has warned against the seductions of national ‘declinism’ on the left, not least because it works symbiotically with the nationalist ‘revivalism’ of the right. The claim that everything has been getting worse for decades is a gift to ...”

“... and for all Freedman’s subtlety, his sympathy is often with British and American leaders. David Deptula, the architect of the American bombing campaign in Iraq in 1991, is thanked in his acknowledgments. Freedman claimed that one of the central themes of Michael Howard’s work was ‘urging Americans to keep a sense of proportion and use their power ...”

“... the two older players in the leadership group, the captain, Steve Smith, and his right-hand man, David Warner, who had instructed Bancroft to ball-tamper. Smith and Warner were suspended for a year, Bancroft for nine months, and there was some question whether they would ever play for Australia again. Cricket Australia commissioned a report, which denounced ...”

“... It was in 1982 that the artist then still known as Prince first invited us to ‘party like it’s 1999’, and in those days everyone quickly grasped what he meant. The Cold War made people edgy (‘Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?’) and it seemed quite possible that we might wake up one morning and find that we were ‘out of time’. But now? Well, ‘it’s here and I like it,’ as Will Smith says in his greeting card to the new year ‘Will 2K ...”