“... transition period. They were belatedly tabled at the summit convened by Bill Clinton at Camp David in July 2000, but Jerusalem was the issue that ultimately led to the failure of the summit and the breakdown of the Oslo peace process. Religious rivalries are notoriously difficult to resolve, and Jerusalem’s spiritual significance for the three great ...”

“... of the year; U is the 21st letter of the alphabet). Brown and his colleagues, Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz, have submitted a name to the International Astronomical Union, but it will remain secret until it gets the IAU’s stamp of approval. Unofficially, they’re calling it ‘Xena’, after the character played by Lucy Lawless in the camp fantasy ...”

“... On 22 March​ 2012, David Cameron visited Kings Science Academy in Bradford, one of the first wave of 24 free schools that opened in September 2011. You can see footage of his visit online. The prime minister walks through the playground, hampered by children in grey blazers, with the school’s headteacher, Sajid Raza, at his elbow ...”

“... activity; and his most recent full-length opera, Gawain, has an ambitious verse libretto by David Harsent. Ted Hughes once wrote a libretto for Gordon Crosse. The Story of Vasco, whose subject-matter involves crows, is an interesting opera by a composer who has now, regrettably, stopped composing. The poet John Birtwhistle supplied ...”

“... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... claimed that network censorship made him and his writers more creative, which is as may be; what’s certain is that it defanged American comedy and completely eliminated the phallic fun of an earlier era’s low-comic hijinks. Harpo’s horn, Chaplin’s cane, W.C. Fields’s walking stick, Groucho’s cigar – the accoutrements of aggression ...”

“... poison indiscriminately wasn’t compelling even on its own terms. ‘However rapidly technology may invent new uses for insecticides and new ways of applying them,’ Carson wrote, ‘it is likely to find the insects keeping a lap ahead.’Sixty years on, that doesn’t seem like such a safe bet. Carson’s work led to the banning of DDT in agricultural ...”

“... satires, to the detriment of consideration of the lyrics on which his reputation used to rest. David Trotter, for instance, shows how the concomitants of satire – wit, swearing, the language of abuse – all became identified for the Latitudinarians with enmity to Reason. Pat Rogers compares ‘An Allusion to Horace’ to its Latin source and provides a ...”

“... the random Ethiope innately repulsive, unworthy of the bright jewel in his or her ear.This may not be the way the image has always worked in practice, however, given that Romeo and Juliet is a play in which dark night is the time of love, garish day the time of destructive violence. Juliet will soon be begging the fiery-footed steeds of the sun to ...”

“... philosophers, have pored over such matters in order to understand the world; and one or two may have come round to his conclusion, that the point is to change it. This seems an unlikely role in which to cast Roy Jenkins. But when the urbane biographer of Asquith undertook the 1979 Dimbleby Lecture (now reprinted in The Rebirth of Britain) he was clearly ...”

“... to fillet felines these days.’ Some of us followed Doom because we thought we were too cool for David Blaine. Doom’s tricks were breath control, intricate rhyme schemes, a beating heart beneath the cold veneer, of which he gave us only occasional glimpses. Now you see it, now you don’t.In his six solo studio albums, numerous collaborations and ...”

“... enjoyably, I settled in front of a neighbour’s television with a bottle of his wine to watch David Dimbleby interview all three of the main party leaders. It was illuminating. Kinnock hardly seemed the same man as the one on Today in Parliament: he was in control both of himself and of the interview. Paddy Ashdown likewise was very impressive, and Major ...”

“... Current Biography, July 1976. Edgar L. Doctorow was born in New York City on 6 January 1931 to David R. and Rose Doctorow, whom he has described as ‘old-fashioned social democrats’. His grandparents on both sides were Jewish immigrants from Russia. Doctorow grew up on Eastburn Avenue, in the Bronx. His mother was a pianist and his father had a store in ...”

“... at any rate? The misinformation would seem to have been on Radji’s part. Two years later, in May 1978, when Radji is acknowledging (to himself) that torture had continued long after he had denied its existence, he is concerned with trying to discredit those who had been tortured. Even when cabling Tehran during the final collapse in November 1978, ‘to ...”

“... in an eternity of vain research along endless shelves.’ Jump forward seventy years, and for David Lodge’s Pooteresque Adam Appleby, the BM is a cosy, quintessentially safe asylum. Adam’s working life there is a matter of daily comforting rituals, as when he cools his research-fevered brow on the downstairs men’s lavatory cistern. The BM shelters ...”