“... Late one evening, leaving a dinner party at the American Embassy, I ran into David Carritt, who told me he had come across a circular bronze relief of the Virgin and Child in use as an ashtray.’ The narrator is Sir John Pope-Hennessy and his nocturnal encounter was with one of the most hawk-eyed art-dealers in Europe ...”

“... what with one thing and another I’ve sometimes felt the same way, on behalf of Mark Frost and David Lynch, about the news environment that accompanied the broadcast of Twin Peaks: The Return. I say ‘on behalf of’ because I imagine that Lynch couldn’t care less. ‘It’s good to kind of go along with your life,’ he told Entertainment Weekly in May ...”

“... The heart of Young Soul Rebels, visually and dramatically, is a scene in an East London club, noisy, cheerful, full of glitter and bounce. Punk and soul music alternate on the disco deck; punk and soul styles are jumbled on the dance floor. Men and women, black and white, gays and straights, mix easily if loudly, having a good time ...”

“... killed himself on 13 January 2017, at the house in Felixstowe he shared with his wife and young son. His mental health had been deteriorating, according to the Ipswich Star’s report of the inquest, since the previous May. His wife, Zoe, told the inquest that they had been seeking help for him, but the local NHS trust hadn’t been able to offer ...”

“... to have found new evidence which proves, amongst other things, the religious affiliations of the young Shakespeare. Honigmann has ventured into the black hole of Shakespeare biography, the years between his marriage in 1582 and the first mention of his success on the London stage in 1592. These years have provided biographers in the past with a convenient ...”

“... Otis Ferguson, a reviewer who never puffed, thought Stewart in The Shop around the Corner ‘a young American with as broad and unaffected a base in a country’s experience as Huck Finn’. It has been the way of critics, and the habit on the whole of audiences, too, to take Stewart as something the native climate effortlessly produced. But Stewart for ...”

“... What these graphs tell us is that overall there is a better chance of getting fat or dying young if you live in an unequal society. But it doesn’t follow that almost everyone is going to benefit from increased equality. That depends on whether the disadvantages of inequality are distributed across the social scale, or whether they cluster at the ...”

“... testimony showed, was a third. An excellent investigative report in the New York Times by David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner took us back to the origins of Trump’s business ethic: he followed his father in sailing close to the wind, and in learning how to hide evidence under one shell or another. It began with New York housing, in rental ...”

“... Thanks to David Mamet’s new play Oleanna, the distracted, bumbling and self-regarding male professor has now become the archetypal victim of political correctness. Mamet’s John is victimised by Carol, the ultimate female intellectual mediocrity who gets her revenge on his patronising didacticism by turning him in to the university tenure committee on grounds of sexual impropriety ...”

“... and whimsical at the same time.’ Patrick is the damaged, scornful victim of his father, David Melrose, ‘descended from Charles II through a prostitute’. Centuries of damp arrest have created the monstrous David: ‘The expression that men feel entitled to wear when they stare out of a cold English drawing-room ...”

“... range of Brexit options at a Tory Conference fringe event in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he ...”

“... own study until October 2020, following the demonstrations inspired by the murder of George Floyd. David W. Blight, director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Centre for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, was chosen to lead the Yale and Slavery Research Project. The result is Yale and Slavery, an analytical narrative that considers institutional ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... whom he described as the first ‘good woman’ he had known, though he soon left her and their young daughter for the journalist and actress Rose Caylor. They married in 1926 and remained together until his death in 1964.At the end of the First World War, Hecht was sent to Europe as a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. He saw in Germany, he later ...”

“... for Donald Trump to be returned to office. There was an international feel to NatCon London. Young men in sharp suits spoke with Italian and Spanish accents. A Catholic priest was deep in conversation with a twentysomething in a kippah. Near the Free Speech Union table there was a trio of fustily dressed ...”