“... end of the decade rare ‘class’ was being shown by such public-school amateurs as Peter May and David Sheppard. In 1949, such was the craze for sport, 90,000 people turned up to watch the FA Amateur Cup Final. As Anthony Bailey, who watched Portsmouth when they won the League Championship two years running, fondly ...”

“... dog! Ye cam to Paradise incog. An’ play’d on man a cursed brogue,    (Black be your fa!) An’ gied the infant warld a shog,    ‘Maist ruin’d a’. It is a mark of Burns’s genius that he makes what he does of the expression ‘lang syne’ – past times, long ago. He has the ability to make poverty erotic and to make the Fall of Man ...”

“... alongside the solitary star. But there is a difference. Good poets in the Alvarez anthology, like David Holbrook or Norman MacCaig, have their counterparts in the present collection, but while not being egotistically impetuous and obsessed in the way Alvarez desiderated, they were also not haunted, as their successors appear to be, by wistful feelings about ...”

“... or directed or narrated by people with a background in business or an interest in business think. David Brailsford, the general manager of Team Sky and the performance director of British Cycling – and therefore the man behind Britain’s eight gold medals in cycling at London 2012 and the Tour de France victories of Wiggins and Froome – studied sports ...”

“... Coast, Ghana, Nigeria or Kenya?’ Like many liberal policy men in Europe – from Paul Collier to David Miliband – Smith locates the tragedy of the migration ‘crisis’ in the drowning out of legitimate asylum requests by the false claims of ‘economic migrants’. The term ‘economic refugee’ originated in Europe in the 1950s. It was first applied to ...”

“... the operation that remained, there was almost no first-hand reporting. One freelance journalist, David Divine, made three trips in a small boat that was rescuing British troops, and the Royal Navy took a Pathé newsreel reporter-cum-cameraman; otherwise the BBC (and British newspapers) relied on the Ministry of Information. The consequences were a mixture of ...”

“... This year​ is both the 70th anniversary of the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany and the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For years Germany has been thought of as both the pace-setter and the anchor of European politics. But in the summer of 2019, the political scene in Berlin is in greater flux than at any time since the Second World War ...”

“... Many readers will sense something odd about such reliance on a vision predating not only David Hume and Adam Smith, but Darwin, Freud, Marx and Durkheim, from an age when genes and the structure of human DNA were undreamt of. Can philosophy really be so timeless? The answer is plainly yes, provided a sufficiently passionate sermon can be extracted ...”

“... and other pre-emptive acts of violence. Another neo-con, the New York Times columnist David Brooks, recently blasted the CIA’s ‘bloodless compilations of data by anonymous technicians’ and praised those analysts who make ‘novelistic judgments’ informed by ‘history, literature, philosophy and theology’. Rumsfeld’s war on the ...”

“... and impoverished, his house a ‘shack’, dark except for the gleaming cockroaches. As the poet David Constantine pointed out in a discussion with Berger, ‘for the bulk of the poem’ Césaire is ‘not celebrating his country, he’s saying what a shit, awful place it is’. He saw himself as facing up to the reality of his underdeveloped homeland from ...”

“... then, that the two finest biographies of Fanon have been written by an Englishman and an American. David Macey’s Frantz Fanon: A Biography was published in 2000: it is the kind of book that has always (justifiably) attracted the epithet ‘magisterial’. Macey’s account is now joined by The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz: necessarily a more ...”

“... question, HSBC suspended Perring’s bank account, as well as that of his 13-year-old daughter. As David Rose reported in UnHerd in October, ‘he was sacked from companies he worked with, ostracised by friends, and ended up £8 million worse off.’ Perring is now planning to file a defamation suit against Steele and others who he alleges were behind the ...”

“... the good manners and the talents of Madame Coswai’. They visited the studios of Jacques-Louis David and of Le Brun, whom Maria found ‘so obliging’ that, as she later confided to her diary, she was almost able to overlook her ‘weak, poor, cheap, common, badly drawn’ work. For her, the most consequential event of the French trip was her meeting with ...”

“... Africa and Belgium.‘Restitution is virtue signalling of an irresponsible sort,’ the historian David Abulafia wrote in the Spectator in January, ‘threatening the integrity of great collections by pretending to apologise for past sins.’ Try sounding off about ‘great collections’ in the West to the Beninois students in Diop’s Dahomey, who lament ...”

“... sample by Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, yet even in this respect Hawking’s book has almost certainly outdone any of Penrose’s brilliant, but bristly and bulky popularisations. (A Brief History of Time is 256 pages long and a documentary about Hawking with the ...”