“... were getting more serious. In 1974 another Clermont habitué and founder of the SAS, Colonel David Stirling, formed GB75, a vigilante group to be mobilised in the event of civil unrest.Veronica Lucan was not only unhappy, she was mentally fragile and her relationship with her sister and brother-in-law volatile. After a spectacularly unhappy Christmas in ...”

“... real features of the living world. Some of the best recent work on this topic has been done by David Queller and Joan Strassmann, of Washington University in St Louis, in their studies of insects and of stranger beasts, such as tiny amoebas which join to form crawling colonies. Queller and Strassmann classify systems using two dimensions, co-operation and ...”

“... writing the front list, the back list will curl up and die.’ There are also some sideswipes at David Baldacci, the writer of a knock-off series starring a beefy military cop called John Puller. Reacher has already had his say, ambushing a thug called Baldacci in an aeroplane toilet and breaking both his arms. After the plane has landed Reacher helps him to ...”

“... that’s been nearly universally praised. Before it was even published, the New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, called it ‘extraordinary’; the New York Times critic A.O. Scott said it was ‘essential, like water or air’; in a widely circulated blurb, Toni Morrison likened Coates to Baldwin and declared the book ‘required reading’; even Jay-Z ...”

“... German invasion and thereby gather useful information, but in the event not much was achieved. As David Abulafia put it, if ‘he was something more than a professor of Byzantine studies … it would be absurd to cast him in the role of James Bond.’ In truth the war was enormously useful to him, allowing him to pursue his research. Afterwards he went to run ...”

“... the Communist Party (the Jewish Arab List) and MKs associated with Zionist parties, especially David Ben Gurion’s Labour. He looks at wedding songs to trace the different streams of Palestinian political behaviour. He finds informers who snitched on their neighbours and on people they saw in the village shop or on the city bus; who reported things they ...”

“... aimed at renouncing the ego. When she finally publishes a book (under a pseudonym), a biography of David Garrick’s mistress, the actress Peg Woffington, she worries that success may change her. But ‘nothing shattering has happened. What I expected I do not know. Did I think I would wake up famous?’ As her capital dwindles, she is preoccupied with ...”

“... of diagnosis had become to justify confinement and coercive treatment. The writings of Laing and David Cooper were early influences on Basaglia, though he didn’t meet Laing until 1969 when he visited Kingsley Hall. What he witnessed there was fundamentally different from what was taking place at Gorizia, operating outside the state healthcare system and ...”

“... clarified me to myself,’ Ammons told him in 1970). Yet when Ammons assented to David Lehman’s interpretation in an interview for the Paris Review (‘I thought you had decided to become influenced by Emerson only after Bloom told you that you had been’), one senses mischief. ‘Harold wants me to be intense, mad, consistently ...”

“... not one joy but what some berk’llWant it ringed wi’ a red circle.That could be David Hockney moaning about the nanny state – and there’s a connection of sorts (both were born into working-class Yorkshire homes in 1937), as there is with Alan Bennett (born in Leeds in 1934). Harrison’s mode is more aggrieved than Bennett’s but the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”