“... In 1851 Flaubert passed through Venice and heard a parrot in a gilt cage calling out over the Grand Canal like a gondolier. ‘Fà eh, capo die.’ Two years later he was in Trouville, lodging with a pharmacien; there was a parrot which screamed unceasingly ‘As-tu déjeuné, Jako?’ and ‘Cocu, mon petit coco!’ It also whistled ‘J’ai du bon ...”

“... it even if it is the size of a tablecloth.’ At the same time, the Zionist leaders, especially David Ben-Gurion, were adept at presenting the Palestinian position as unreasonable. It is not that they weren’t interested in a compromise solution. But since the claims of the two sides could not be reconciled, it was preferable to have the Palestinians ...”

“... and rode to the rescue of the working miners like knights to maidens in distress. One of these was David Hart, a former property magnate and bankrupt, who had recovered and lived in grand style, country-squiring, looking for a safe Tory seat and writing novels. Hart was deeply attached to Thatcher and to MacGregor, whom he ...”

“... disciplines of sociology, social psychology, clinical psychology and anthropology. The resident grand maître in anthropology was Clyde Kluckhohn, who, in a manner characteristic of early Cold War imperial America, presided over two huge research projects. One was the comparative study of values in five adjacent, mostly colonised, cultures in the North ...”

“... he was more robust than Mr Earbrass. His ‘meticulous’ art boards, the production editor David Hough recalled, did not need editing and suggestions were not welcome. There was he said, ‘a bit of a ruckus’ over the hyphen in The Haunted Tea-Cosy.By 1963, successive changes of job and imprint had left Gorey stranded as an unhappy employee of ...”

“... programmers. The first chess-playing program was written on slips of paper by Alan Turing and David Champernowne in the late 1940s. At the time, it was easy to think that a computer capable of playing a decent game would require a kind of general reasoning capacity, that it might need to make logical deductions, think strategically and learn abstract ...”

“... wave of militancy among agricultural workers erupted into a harvest-time strike at Rudston Farm. David Holtby could afford the wage increases: it was the Saturday half-day that he couldn’t stomach. Baffled and defeated, he threw in his hand and sold the farm. Winifred came back from the war to find her parents living in wealthy suburban Cottingham, on the ...”

“... into a network of encounters with others. To this end, O’Hara even conceives of himself as Grand Central Station: ‘if they are not thundering into me/they are thundering across me … On rainy days I ache as if a train/were about to arrive, I switch my tracks.’ His own Dejection Ode is the subtle and painful poem ‘Essay on Style’, in which he ...”

“... adopted it in a decorous shape for his longest and most ambitious work, The Moralists. David Hume, whom Diderot befriended in Paris in the 1760s, used it to scandalously sceptical effect in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, unpublishable until after his death. Diderot’s most famous work is a dialogue: Rameau’s Nephew, in which a ...”

“... Brigaders, Trotskyites, Communists, pacifists failed by their tribunals. The playwright David Hare declared recently that working-class conscripts now met ‘the officer class’ for the first time and rebelled; but plenty had met the people issuing orders, at least since Peterloo. Moreover, an Army largely unemployed except in training or retreat ...”

“... real features of the living world. Some of the best recent work on this topic has been done by David Queller and Joan Strassmann, of Washington University in St Louis, in their studies of insects and of stranger beasts, such as tiny amoebas which join to form crawling colonies. Queller and Strassmann classify systems using two dimensions, co-operation and ...”

“... on the landing wall. The japes were taking a nightmarish turn and in an uneasy political climate grand schemes were getting more serious. In 1974 another Clermont habitué and founder of the SAS, Colonel David Stirling, formed GB75, a vigilante group to be mobilised in the event of civil unrest.Veronica Lucan was not only ...”

“... had made the city what it was: a completely contemporary thing. The Bengalis had no recognisable grand history, in the way the Rajasthanis or Biharis did. ‘Even the Oriyas have a history,’ said Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the first major Bengali novelist, scathingly: Bengalis had to make their own history; they did it in their houses and rented rooms, and ...”

“... overwhelming desire to re-establish sovereignty over the peninsula, demilitarised since the Camp David Accords. The extent of the Islamists’ deference to the military was made plain when the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood was forced to retract derogatory remarks he had made about the military’s willingness to bend to the wishes of ...”

“... decided to proceed against Hone not by an indictment, which would have to be endorsed by a grand jury and would give Hone enough notice to arrange his bail and prepare an elaborate defence, but by an ‘information’, which would bring him directly to trial with as little time for preparation as possible. In the event he was arrested on a Saturday ...”