“... that would make up his second collection, North of Boston (1914); he approached a publishing firm, David Nutt, as represented by Mrs M.L. Nutt, ‘a woman dressed all in black, as if she had just risen from the sea’, who bought the first book and an option to publish the next four.Through the Imagist F.S. Flint, he secured ...”

“... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...”

“... letters, packed with insight and wonderful phrases, are quoted in Brett Millier’s biography, in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet and in Lorrie Goldensohn’s Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. ‘What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless ...”

“... the Israeli historian Saul Friedländer has claimed, is based on an argument advanced by David Irving.) Nolte does not explain how the president of an international organisation without a state, or government, or army – an organisation whose purpose in 1939 was to advise the British on the question of Palestine and offer relief to the persecuted ...”

“... which broadly complements the illuminating recent sketches of Henrician politics by the historian David Starkey. Thomas Starkey’s proposals are rooted in the Lancastrian conciliarism of the Middle Ages, when the peerage had kept the crown in check. The nostalgic or reactionary component of the Dialogue is repeatedly evident. We see it in Starkey’s ...”

“... year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David Marquand, who was at Magdalen and who told me how he had been scared out of his wits one dark night in the cloisters when Bruce had swept past him in his Spanish cloak. I must have written to him and been told to come down to Magdalen, though I remember ...”

“... to exploit this insight. Since childhood he’s been a fan of another chameleon and shape-shifter, David Bowie, who was raised, like the author, in Bromley. Similarly, Kureishi’s next novel The Black Album was named after a bootleg LP by Prince to whom the main character, Shahid, is devoted. Prince plunders freely from various musical genres, from rock or ...”

“... had already retired from the ministry when he began the vast task of translating Kierkegaard, and David Swenson died in the middle of translating the great Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which was, however, completed by Lowrie, and first appeared in 1941. But in 1941, there were other, more pressing things to think about, and it was not until Sartre and ...”

“... he’ll come in handy soon; we’ve been without an MD so far. Among the lawyers there is one, Dr F.K., they all seem to look up to – very quiet, though. 30.x. As I expected, the language question is proving troublesome and is aggravating our relations with the new lot that arrived two days ago. It’s bad enough their talking nothing but German among ...”

“... i is ideology, and T is Treason. Ha, thought I’d forgotten f? No, it’s just that f is the pièce de résistance: it stands, would you believe it, for flawed character. It is with some relief that one turns to Anthony Glees’s Secrets of the Service. Glees is a professional historian and rightly attempts to place British intelligence ...”

“... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...”

“... for a great range of thinkers, including Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a moment.Guy Standing is a long-standing member of BIEN, the Basic Income Earth ...”

“... parties remains activated in the present stand-off. Economic tensions, carefully explained by David Styan in Unfinished Business, have continued to simmer, while old ideological grievances between the Tigrayan and Eritrean movements, exacerbated by the TPLF’s constitution for a post-Cold War Ethiopia, have given way to something like hatred. One of the ...”

“... by Mrs Thatcher but now wholly outmoded.24 October. Judy Egerton sends me Among Booksellers by David Batterham. Batterham is a second-hand bookseller and the book a collection of letters to Howard Hodgkin from the places, some of them quite far-flung, where book-buying has taken him. There are letters from Spain, Finland, provincial France and even ...”

“... to perform the alchemy, and to get a licence you needed help from the top. The Washington Post’s David Hoffman, in the best journalistic account of the heroic age of Russian capitalism, The Oligarchs, found an old professor, the head of a giant research institute, who remembered Khodorkovsky and another young man coming to him to ask for some start-up ...”