“... looms, nature documentaries have become big business. The last six years have seen a succession of David Attenborough hits: Blue Planet II, Dynasties and Dynasties II, The Green Planet and Frozen Planet II on the BBC; and on Netflix, Our Planet, A Life on Our Planet and Planet Earth II. Attenborough’s most recent series, Wild Isles, was watched by more than ...”

“... it back to the studio bosses. When Garland became pregnant by her first husband, a musician called David Rose, the studio encouraged her to have an abortion: a baby would have ruined her image as a girlish ingénue.Garland felt the oppression of being an eternal teenager so keenly that she didn’t immediately welcome Meet Me in St Louis when discussions about ...”

“... of government: McGeorge Bundy, who left the National Security Council to head the Ford Foundation; David Rockefeller, who founded the Trilateral Commission, President Carter’s think tank of choice; and William Burden, Eisenhower’s ambassador to Belgium and a financier whose friendship ensured Brzezinski’s instant admission to the Harbour Club on Mount ...”

“... system safer, the answer again is that we don’t really know. As the financial historian David Marsh observed, the only way you can properly test a firewall is by having a fire. I think the ring-fence is an opportunity missed. That goes for a lot of the small complicated rules designed to make banks and the financial system safer. Bankers complain ...”

“... Hebrew University of Jerusalem. When the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, died in 1952, David Ben-Gurion is reported to have said: ‘There is only one man whom we should ask to become the president of the State of Israel. He is the greatest Jew on Earth. Maybe the greatest human being on Earth: Einstein.’ Einstein demurred. ‘My relationship to ...”

“... before the launch of the NHS’s new technology arm, NHSX, Mosley hosted a meal attended by David Prior, chair of NHS England. Documents obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism show that Mosley emailed Prior the next day, thanking him for coming. Prior replied that evening: ‘Louis, Thank you for hosting such an interesting dinner and also ...”

“... disdained, or at any rate transcended, always a part of it.It’s a live performance on Classic FM, a concert by the Liverpool Phil. with someone coughing badly throughout and a rather wayward account by the soloist, who sometimes slows it down so much that it almost stops, the swooning second subject in the last movement well over the top. These days ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for systematic differences behind the territorial separation. In his Revel, Riot and Rebellion, David Underdown has argued that two antagonistic rural cultures – quite close to popular images of Cavalier and Roundhead – existed in sheep-corn lowlands and wood-pasture uplands, based on distinct village and manorial patterns, and that it was these which ...”