“... ground up there. Gets real fucking heated sometimes’). He has a smaller, younger comrade, Daniel Murphy – Murph. Their sergeant, Sterling, is a semi-deranged martinet who excels in ‘death and brutality and domination’. We later learn that, during training, Sterling has identified Murph as someone in need of protection: ‘All right, little ...”

“... as an experiment I tried some yellow stain on a small patch and this turned the wall a vibrant green, too strong I’m sure for many people but for me ideal, so that’s how I did the whole room. The study next door I did differently using water-based stains and as the walls here were lime plaster too I painted them in a mixture of umber and orange, yellow ...”

“... politics, the rhetoric of war and wartime mobilisation is commonplace. American advocates of the Green New Deal called for a repeat of the staggering industrial production achieved during the Second World War. In the UK, memories of the postwar welfare state persist. There is talk of the Marshall Plan.But isn’t this all rather too convenient? A ‘good ...”

“... they were open to social contact. A red badge meant: ‘Nobody should try to interact with me.’ Green meant: ‘I want to interact but am having trouble initiating, so please initiate an interaction with me.’ As a result of the prominence given to the Autism Wars, it took a long time for the autism-rights message to move from the fringes to the ...”

“... A full-scale biography of Daniel O’Connell deserves close attention, if only because the subject was such a colossus in his own time. This particular biography calls for even greater respect because its author, Oliver Mac Donagh, has established himself as the most incisive and (with the late F.S.L. Lyons) the most prolific Irish-born historian of his generation ...”

“... be true and clear, When I finally have filed them. Love glosses and gilds them . . . Arnaut Daniel, translated by Ezra Pound The history of culture affords few absolute beginnings, but the temptation to posit them can be irresistible. The notion that there might have been a first vernacular love song is counterintuitive, however: how could there ever ...”

“... oak to regenerate satisfactorily below closed canopies or those with small openings. Furthermore, Daniel Kelly has found that in Ireland young oaks in the open were worse affected by mildew than those under a canopy. Conversely, Rackham cites instances of regeneration in existing woods in the Middle Ages, but perhaps does not allow for the effect on the ...”

“... mocked the idea of direct elections to a consultative body, but in the 1970s Giscard gave it the green light, in exchange for the small states’ conceding a greater role to intergovernmental summitry. The first Europe-wide elections were held in 1979, but the Parliament’s function was still advisory. The MEPs were not lawmakers; their task was to issue a ...”

“... The subject of Daniel Ellsberg’s memoir is the decadence of American democracy. The conditions he began fighting in 1969 are much worse today and far more dangerous to many more people. Yet central casting could not have produced a more perfect foil for the American imperial Presidency than Ellsberg. An infantry lieutenant in the Marine Corps with genuine battle experience in Vietnam, a PhD in economics from Harvard, and a defence intellectual employed by the Rand Corporation of Santa Monica, with the highest security clearances, Ellsberg is as good as the American system can produce in the way of a male citizen working in the foreign policy apparatus ...”

“... colours to each of the spirit guides: blue and violet for Amaliel, gold and white for Ananda, green for Gregor (green also stood for ‘joy in life’). Blue and yellow meant male and female respectively, although she generally avoided binary thinking. Her notebooks and sketches depict ‘dual souls’, whose gender is ...”

“... after all, have shortened the war. And the military reasons behind the legendary attack on Goose Green by 2 Para are hard to find. Major Keeble, who took over command there when Colonel ‘H’ was killed, is reported to have said that its motives were not military but political. The authors of The Falklands War suggest that either Northwood or Downing ...”

“... It sure as hell wasn’t you!’ In Walls Come Tumbling Down, an oral history of the campaign, Daniel Rachel describes what happened next. Several hundred people – music fans, young Jewish punks, even the future broadcaster Rod Liddle, then at school in Middlesbrough – wrote back to Saunders, pledging their support for his initiative. An informal ...”

“... Perched​ on one platform, King Charles I; perched on another, the Dutch painter Daniel Mytens; lowered in between them, a canvas some two feet taller than the king, who was reportedly of small stature. If, as an inscription on the finished portrait insists, the likeness was painted ad vivum, then this might have been the way to do it ...”

“... Before he became Senator for New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an academic and the author, with Nathan Glazer, of Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, published in 1963. Moynihan’s chief contribution was the chapter on the New York Irish, a lament which begins: ‘New York used to be an Irish city ...”

“... Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington State, where the rolling expanses of lawn look like ‘green Lego pads’ and the halls are peopled not with clean-shaven men in crisp pinstripes but ungainly ‘nerds’ clad in Levi’s Dockers and ‘Tommy Hilfiger geekwear’. The flux, enthusiasm and paranoia of the first days of television have been replicated ...”