“... of alternatives when presented only with the choice that has been made? As composer-pianist David Tudor once said of the piece: ‘With Boulez the form is completely external. In the big section, there’s a breathtaking sound that is just like glass. With one of us younger cats the sound itself would have dictated the form of the work, whereas that ...”

“... from his friends what he later felt had been severe mental suffering, not least when his brother David fell to his death from a hotel window at the age of 19; most of all, he concealed the Game, and had a lifelong terror of people finding out about it. He admired Rimbaud and drank heavily; Barbara tried to coax him away from the bottle. He went off to Spain ...”

“... Guided at times by Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner and David Brion Davis conceived slavery as a mode of organising labour, as well as a system of racial domination. This led to the recognition that advocates of ‘free labour’ had economic as well as humanitarian reasons for opposing slavery, and that the Northern ...”

“... responsible for Julian’s fondness for country squirely pursuits. There’s a good description by David Garnett of Julian beagling at Cambridge: he was ‘far bigger, noisier and more raggedly dressed than any of his companions … bursting with happy excitement … Late in the afternoon Julian turned up with his ragged clothes torn to tatters, which flapped ...”

“... clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on Suffolk Street, round the corner from ...”

“... of the Novel and which touched painfully on Watt’s wartime experience. Among his objections to David Lean’s blockbuster The Bridge on the River Kwai were its ignorant unrealism about the possibility of escape from the Thai railway camps and its concentration on the improbable exploits of its American hero, Shears (played by the hunky William Holden). In ...”

“... become Pottery Lane is the only identifiable landmark. The studio of the photographer played by David Hemmings in Antonioni’s Blow-Up is on Pottery Lane. The Grove sweeps down into Notting Dale, and passes several of the large communal gardens that are a feature of the Ladbroke Estate, and which appear in the novels of Alan Hollinghurst. People tell me ...”

“... past Qatar preferred soft power prestige investments to buying weapons from the West. (In 2015, David Cameron went to Doha at BAE’s behest to sell British warplanes, and returned empty-handed.) But it discovered to its cost that Western powers would be half-hearted in its defence unless it used some of its $340 billion sovereign wealth fund to buy Western ...”

“... Sr … lynched in Shreveport, Louisiana for allegedly writing a note to a white woman’; ‘David Walker, his wife and five children lynched in Hickman, Kentucky, in 1908 after Mr Walker was accused of using inappropriate language with a white woman.’ ‘Warren Powell, 14’, lynched in 1899 for ‘frightening’ a white girl. Henry Patterson for ...”

“... efforts amounted to little more than a publicity vehicle for figures such as the Klansman David Duke and Green Beret vigilante Bo Gritz. In a bout of white power infighting, the neo-Nazi factions of the white power movement hounded Carto as a swindler of right-wing funds, and a ‘swarthy’ man of questionable racial make-up. The second seriously ...”

“... perhaps global – meanings of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, we barely notice, as David Mamet has reminded us, how recognisably Jewish is the experience on which it is based. In the visual arts, one or two distinguished figures who happened to be Jews (Liebermann, Pissarro) gave way to a cosmopolitan 20th-century diaspora in which Jews were ...”

“... the agents of American defeat. One, Abel Kavanaugh, facing a court martial, shot himself. Another, David Wesley Hoffman, had been one of the pows who volunteered to meet with Fonda. He hoped to remain in the military. He met with Pentagon officials on his release; then, on 13 April 1973, all three television networks covered a news conference in which he said ...”

“... about Scottish culture. A more pluralistic version of her book would bring in the satires of David Lyndsay, the poetry of Alexander Hume and the boisterous, incisive prose of John Knox, who pushed forward the Scottish Reformation while being open to English perspectives. There is a paradox behind the paradox on which this book is based, which is that it ...”

“... improving organisational capacity of the SNP during the 1960s; the discovery of North Sea oil; or David McCrone and Steven Kendrick’s elegant theory, which emphasises the role of television in a distinctly Scottish news media, producing a ‘Scottish frame of reference’ for contentious state planning decisions that could be exploited by the SNP.The story ...”