“... How long​ do we have left, and how bad will it get? David Wallace-Wells opens his book with a short, sharp reality check: ‘It’s worse, much worse, than you think.’ All the news is bad. Marshalling research from across the sprawling field of climate studies, Wallace-Wells paints a picture of disastrous change on an almost incomprehensible scale ...”

“... and, more violently, how much they loved the heavily lipglossed singer in a band called Japan. David Sylvian was his name. The girls called him David. So far as I remember, the diary was a pretty spectacular fantasia of adolescent lusts and local hatreds: Dear Katherine, David came ...”

“... despised abroad and at home, this crowing may prove not to have been the wisest of moves. David Kelly’s decision to take his own life on 17 July 2003 produced a wave of public revulsion against the government, and against the prime minister in particular. It could have seemed a relatively minor event – the sad death of an eminent public servant ...”

“... them were some of the most noble families in the land. This theme is not entirely neglected in David Cannadine’s book – it inevitably rears its head on many occasions – but it does not form the main focus of his interest. This is a pity, for there can be few historians equally familiar with both the general social history and the particular details ...”

“... at once. Perhaps it’s just the best we can do. Perhaps we should have stuck to philosophy.Caspar David Friedrich is a possible exception. Born in 1774 in Greifswald on the Baltic coast, he studied painting in Copenhagen and in 1798 moved to Dresden, the so-called or self-styled ‘Florence on the Elbe’, where he died in 1840. A major retrospective of his ...”

“... cunning and high spirits.’ That comes as close as anything. The unperplexedness of the story means that it knows what it is doing and where it is going, but neither knows nor cares what it means. An invisible barrier separates old from new fairy stories, like the glass wall round the princess in Andrew Lang’s Crimson ...”

“... words a day; but since some days apparently only merited a few lines and others none at all, this means that it was not uncommon for a day to receive a thousand or even fifteen hundred words of description. In a way this is fair enough, since few people are as busy as a conscientious Cabinet Minister, and there is plenty to record. All the same, the mind ...”

“... Did it hold the political whiphand? In the second volume of his trilogy on the City since 1815, David Kynaston repeatedly shows his familiarity with the controversies. But his technique is to deal fair-mindedly and unexceptionably with them, more or less in passing; the book makes no claim to be an incisive or provocative analysis of the City’s role in ...”

“... old George’ of Poplar had come to personify grassroots Labour in much the same way as David Blunkett of the ‘socialist republic’ of South Yorkshire did in the late 1970s. Shepherd sees Lansbury’s evolution into a Cockney icon as a parable of the working-class boy made good by a conversion to socialism. But some of the photographs which ...”

“... is heard to mutter: ‘You’ll be wanting the gold fillings out of their teeth next.’ 2) The David Irving libel trial in February. Reading from the transcript of an interview with Irving on Australian television, Richard Rampton QC, barrister for the defence, asks why Irving had said that the idea of black men playing cricket for England made him feel ...”

“... to find some students who have gone pot-holing and not come up. A young caver from our village, David Anderson, is one of the rescue team. The water is rising and as he is going down he slips into a narrow gulley. Though he is roped up, the force of the torrent is too much for his companions: as they struggle to pull him out, his light still shining through ...”

“... have studied the elaborate system of rules and structures that make an ‘infinite use of finite means’ – Wilhelm von Humboldt’s description of the unbounded combinatorial power of language. According to Pinker, the dominance of rationalism in linguistics is now being challenged by the model of ‘connectionist networks’, the modern embodiment of ...”

“... into a wide range of matters of public interest, from the Aberfan disaster to the death of David Kelly, Profumo to tabloid phone hacking. On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war – to investigate, as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, put it, ‘the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made ...”

“... its constitutional prerogatives). The Trilateral Commission – a discussion group founded by David Rockefeller to bring together policymakers, academics and journalists from North America, Western Europe and Japan – put out a controversial report in 1975 titled The Crisis of Democracy, which argued that an overload of welfare responsibilities was ...”

“... to put people right about other people is incorrigible, indeed obsessional. In his review of David Cecil’s biography of Max Beerbohm Malcolm Muggeridge allowed it to be a graceful job of work, but said it missed the real point about Beerbohm and his lifestyle, which was that he concealed his Jewish origins and was a crypto-homosexual. Of ...”