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“... in the USA in the late 1960s (as they were for his rather earlier and more durable recognition in France and South America). They were, however, questioned on strictly tactical grounds at the very start of the weightiest essay published in the USA in the aftermath of the events at Berkeley, Fredric Jameson’s ‘Ernst Bloch and the Future’. Jameson begins ...”

“... send British and French troops to Egypt in 1956 was sealed during a secret meeting at Sèvres in France, where British, French and Israeli representatives agreed on a plan that would allow the Israelis to attack the Egyptians, and the British and French to intervene in order to separate them, reclaiming the canal in the process. The decision to send British ...”

“... and style. ‘Israel’s Monarch’ seems slyly to emphasise that it is not, in fact, Jewish David with whom the poem will deal; and ‘Before Polygamy was made a Sin’ conveys just the right accentuation on polysyllabic gloating, and terse shocked monosyllable. There is on balance no very good reason to retain First Folio spelling for ordinary ...”

“... David Wallace​ ’s Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 contains 82 chapters by an enormous team of international contributors spanning what Wallace describes as nine ‘itineraries’: Paris to Béarn; Calais to London; St Andrews to Finistère; Basel to Danzig; Avignon to Naples; Palermo to Tunis; Cairo to Constantinople; Mount Athos to Muscovy; Venice to Prague ...”

“... the light was best. ‘Would you like me to pose for you?’ said Mary, bored by the book. David raised his eyebrows. ‘It’s rather cold.’ ‘David! I didn’t mean –’ ‘Of course not. I was being silly.’ She looked at his suddenly serious face, with the light coming through behind it, and she ...”

“... with the two most striking works of the English critic who writes best about the American cinema. David Thomson’s magnificent Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema (1975 – revised edition, 1980) and his lurid Overexposures: The Crisis in American Film-Making (1981) are the work of an intellectual who loves and distrusts films. Throughout Overexposures, he ...”

“... self-important, fussy, but sensitive to beauty, romance and alien cultures – who is uppermost in David Gilmour’s splendid new biography. Gilmour punctures the myth of the insufferably arrogant and despotically ‘un-English’ Curzon perpetuated by society gossip and by the hostile accounts of the Beaverbrook circle. Attendants at his Indian court did not ...”

“... in the US years before the Penguin school of cookery writers found its greatest star in Elizabeth David in the late Fifties and early Sixties. For these writers, and for Patience Gray, cookery is what the open road was to Cobbett or the natural history of Selbourne to Gilbert White. There is, however, a difference: these are women to whom food is not an end ...”

“... that Cambodia will follow a system of liberal democracy on the basis of pluralism.’ To read David Chandler’s painstakingly researched history of Cambodia and its turbulent politics since 1945, and to visit present-day Cambodia, is to understand the enormity of the task facing the United Nations as it attempts to bring peace to the country and to ...”

“... and Thackeray were pall-bearers at Jerrold’s funeral and, according to their contemporary David Masson, ‘the three do form a triad so that it is hardly possible to discuss the merits of any one of them without referring to the other two.’ Posterity has found it very possible. And, richly informative as Slater’s biography is (he has been at it ...”

“... or simply informative they were generally more stoical than bellicose and often humorous. David Welch’s account is based on the Central Office of Information archive in the British Library, with occasional excursions beyond it, and he considers a wide range of material. It was in the summer of 1939, when war seemed inevitable, that a propaganda ...”

“... to another room, where they served after-dinner drinks. I found myself in a conversation with David Cameron about the HBO show Entourage, which we both apparently enjoyed – in a room full of royals, the prime minister is oddly diminished, just another staffer.‘The Impermanence of Importance’ would have made a good alternative title for this ...”

“... yes!’ came the enthusiastic chorus. You might say that the Jerusalem Syndrome began with King David. Once he had escorted Israel’s sacred Ark of the Covenant into the city, having conquered its Jebusite inhabitants and proclaimed it his capital, he danced in his exaltation ‘before the Lord with all his might … girded with a linen ephod’ – the ...”

“... to get anything done in our cumbersome and bureaucratic democracy. They point enviously to France, where things seem to happen faster, though that isn’t always the case: the TGV goes to Nice, but not yet on a high-speed line, as a result of local protests. Jim Steer is HS2’s biggest fan. The former chief railway planner at the Strategic Rail ...”

“... countless critical treatises, and even apart from his still oddly scandalous paintings at which, David Ellis reports, 13,000 visitors to London’s Warren Gallery gawked in the early summer of 1929, he was a figure of extraordinary fascination, even during his lifetime. Paradoxically, then, to contemplate works by the author of that famous critical maxim ...”