“... Oxford History of France volumes on the central and later Middle Ages, edited by Marcus Bull and David Potter respectively, also highlight the formation of a ‘French sense of identity’. Although the role of the king in consolidating power and extending territory is emphasised in all of these books, it is seen as only one aspect of political ...”

“... What if?’ is the question all fiction asks. Oedipus Rex: ‘What if someone unknowingly killed his father and married his mother?’ Emma: ‘What if someone accidentally encouraged her friend to fall in love with the man she didn’t know she loved herself?’ Science fiction generally deals in larger ‘what ifs?’ about the underlying rules that structure the world ...”

“... programmers. The first chess-playing program was written on slips of paper by Alan Turing and David Champernowne in the late 1940s. At the time, it was easy to think that a computer capable of playing a decent game would require a kind of general reasoning capacity, that it might need to make logical deductions, think strategically and learn abstract ...”

“... to be them,’ but she didn’t know how, so instead of that, she ‘made it’ once with David Johansen, the Dolls’ lead singer, and drove the band around, together with their girlfriends, in her father’s turquoise Buick.It was while she was following the Dolls around that Harry met Elda Gentile, who had the idea of forming a band called Pure ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... finding the experience particularly off-putting. That wasn’t true of some of their peers. David Bomberg, a far greater artist (his Ronda Bridge from 1935, reproduced here, leaps out from the page), would later exhibit with the AIA, but he was deeply unnerved by his own visit to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and kept his distance from the ...”

“... grungers Green River adopted the nickname of a femicidal mass murderer.In 1988, Melody Maker’s David Stubbs declared that it had been ‘the best ever year for rock music’, listing 49 bands in evidence. Hardly any of them had cracked the top ten of the album chart. Three years later, the unthinkable happened: grunge went mainstream, with Nirvana’s ...”

“... to the contrary. ‘The category “the West” does not seem to be in Donald Trump’s head,’ David Brooks wrote at the start of Trump’s second term. In The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, Alexander Karp, the head of Palantir, writes that ‘the West’ is ‘a concept that has been discarded by many, almost ...”

“... and she went in search of him. At a pub near Avondale Square she met a friend of Ronnie’s called David. He said he’d been with Ronnie the day before and that Ronnie was in bed the last time he saw him. (The coroner would later describe this man as an ‘unsavoury witness’ without detailing why.) Mrs Pinn, in company with another boy from the bar, went to ...”

“... the same from one abbey to the next.2 April, Yorkshire. Come across a thirty-year-old note from David Vaisey, at that time a postgraduate student at Bodley and subsequently its Librarian. The note just has a crudely drawn swastika and the slogan ‘A.L. Raus’.14 April. Pass two slightly cheeky-looking middle-aged businessmen in Hanover Square, one of whom ...”

“... to do.’ Dimbleby adds, by way of rumour, that Major and Hurd regarded the outgoing governor, Sir David Wilson (who was sacked to make way for Patten), ‘as one of the principal advocates of the “appeasement” of China, an approach which they believed could no longer be sustained after the atrocity of Tiananmen Square in June 1989’. But, while he avoids ...”

“... being wonderfully in his element to being woefully misunderstood and undervalued, this time by David Lean in his ghastly film Doctor Zhivago. ‘Under any circumstances,’ MacGowran was later to say, ‘I couldn’t work happily with David Lean.’ There were, unfortunately, very few figures of the calibre of Beckett ...”

“... government and security officials overseas and in the UK – among them, Assistant Commissioner David Veness, head of Specialist Operations for the Metropolitan Police, the officer in overall operational charge of countering terror in the United Kingdom. Dr Ranstorp is an expert on Hizbollah, and books such as Palestinian Hamas, Defiant Patriot, The Kidnap ...”

“... envisaged both by Article 53 of the convention and by Section 11 of the Human Rights Act itself. David Cameron advocates replacement of the Human Rights Act with a bill of rights and responsibilities entrenched against repeal. Gordon Brown advocates a new constitutional document ‘in parallel’, as the recent green paper puts it, with a bill of rights and ...”

“... to touch the ground, as one meeting followed another in Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Washington, Camp David and Ottawa. As Sarotte says, the tempo was at times ‘unimaginable’. At the Ottawa conference in February 1990, which was supposed to be about aviation, Baker ‘managed in just one day … to speak at least five times each to both Genscher and ...”