“... one would expect from any collection of pictures, except for the jarring and very public Star of David which feels eerily as if it had invaded the private space of the pictures without its bearers having noticed. There were 1536 such pictures in the first, 1994 French edition; 1834 in the 1995 edition; another 497 in a January 1996 supplement; and a further ...”

“... clunker, no longer worth the extra expense. Increasingly, medicine has become, in the words of Sir David Weatherall, a series of ‘expensive symptomatic patch-up procedures’ and we do not have the cultural tools to resolve this dilemma. A recent article in the New York Times on the role of medical devices in raising medical costs told the story of a baby ...”

“... do like reading other women, and seeing them properly recognised for their work.But it’s also, David Runciman reckons on his Talking Politics podcast, to do with the eventfulness of Arendt’s life, which is why Ken Krimstein’s comic-book biography of 2018 is structured around our heroine’s ‘Three Escapes’. Arendt did not arrive in the US until ...”

“... making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working’ – from an article by David Graeber for Strike! magazine about ‘bullshit jobs’. Productive jobs, he argues, have been automated away and replaced by administrative ones which masquerade as service: HR, PR, financial services, ancillary industries like dog-washing and all-night ...”

“... to the ‘public good’ or else to the Jewish people, where these sometimes seem to be the same. David Blumberg, chairman of the board of directors of the National Library, puts the case this way: ‘The library does not intend to give up on cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people … Because it is not a commercial institution and the items kept there ...”

“... is taking place today largely in memoirs and essays. This is one of many brilliant observations in David Shields’s recent manifesto Reality Hunger, in which he argues that we had best give up the novel altogether. But I don’t think the novel is dead – or, more accurately, I don’t see why it has to be dead. It’s simply being produced under the kinds ...”

“... I came in the latter category. I went round to see him after Home and he said how much he liked David Storey. ‘He’s the ideal author … never says a word!’ In Chariots of Fire he shared a scene with Lindsay Anderson, both of them playing Cambridge dons. Lindsay was uncharacteristically nervous but having directed John G. in Home felt able to ask his ...”

“... 100 Agents of Change’ in the waste debate. Standing at number 28 – one above new entrant David Miliband, the environment secretary – is a man called Andy Moore, who is head of the Community Recycling Network. The first time I met him, in the bar at Paddington Station, he seemed weary but refreshingly non-morose when it came to talking about ...”

“... sense of detail: Never, never was I ‘tall’ – as you wrote remembering me. I was always 5 ft 4 and a 1/4 inches, now shrunk to 5 ft 4 inches – The only time I’ve ever felt tall was in Brazil. And I never had ‘long brown hair’ either! – It started turning grey when I was 23 or 24 – and probably was ...”

“... first and last British soldiers to embark on her.The Esk’s rescue of the Scotia is well told by David Divine in The Nine Days of Dunkirk, first published in 1959. The ship had been hit ‘abaft the engine-room on the starboard side and on the poop deck, and in the final attack one bomb went down the after-funnel. Scotia was heavily damaged and began to sink ...”

“... laughing.A fight broke out in the audience at a performance of Forty Years On between the actor David Buck, who liked the play, and a member of the audience who presumably didn’t.In a performance of A Question of Attribution at the National I was nearly decapitated by a piece of rogue scenery.The History Boys also at the National was interrupted by a ...”

“... needle-pointer from Singer; at the Albion Works, William Gallacher of the BSP; at Beardmore’s, David Kirkwood, who had recently joined the ILP and was a reluctant supporter of the war (‘I was too proud of the battles of the past to stand aside and see Scotland conquered’); and at Barr and Stroud, John Muir, also of the SLP.The strike ended after a ...”

“... by our ruling metaphors, and the key metaphor of the age of meritocracy is ‘the ladder’. As David Cameron put it in 2013: ‘You help people by putting up ladders that they can climb through their own efforts.’ But this may not paint quite as inviting a picture as Cameron hoped. Ladders are confining modes of ascent, which don’t leave much room for ...”

“... of Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the contraceptive pill was widely available, I only half believed I could coerce my body, and suspected that it might have some ...”

“... bookshop in Paris, Berlin or Madrid stocked with translations of Baldwin, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, David Graeber and other messengers from an alternative American future.We are​ very far from that future. Instead Trump and company seem bent on returning to 19th-century gunboat diplomacy, invoking the threat of ‘narco-terrorism’ to justify acts of ...”