“... and out of date. The Iraqi government seemed almost surprised by its own decisiveness. It is by no means as confident as it pretends to be that it can survive without US backing, but it unexpectedly found itself riding a nationalist wave. A poll by ABC News, the BBC and other television networks in February showed that 61 per cent of Iraqis think the presence ...”

“... Cecil’s tactics. All the subsequent Catholic ‘plots’, including the Gunpowder Plot, were the means ‘the Cecils’ used to destroy their enemies. The Ridolphi Plot was re-examined by Geoffrey Parker in a 2001 lecture on ‘The Place of Tudor England in the Messianic Vision of Philip II of Spain’. Parker could find no evidence that Ridolphi was an ...”

“... that surrounded his reputation both in his own day and afterwards, as reflected in the 1962 David Lean biopic, presenting him as the romantic hero – tall, blue-eyed, in flowing robes – he always wanted to be. His failures are familiar to anyone who has taken any serious interest in him, and were only too painfully known to himself. He either led or ...”

“... premises in Stratford during or soon after the town’s first great Shakespearean festival, David Garrick’s Jubilee of 1769; it may even have adorned the Birthplace itself, part of which was still in business as the Swan and Maidenhead Inn. Garrick himself preferred to think of the infant Shakespeare being taught by Nature rather than Fancy: but the ...”

“... Alliance, when it was subsequently faced with ostensibly less intractable difficulties. Now that David Owen’s ‘continuing SDP’ has gone out of business, some gullible newspapers have written as though the party that was launched nine years ago had sunk with all hands aboard. In fact, of course, constitutionally and numerically, the real continuing SDP ...”

“... the articulation of the body remained (as Bernini’s work triumphantly demonstrated) the primary means of artistic expression. Even in a landscape, it was the figures that created significance. By making the principal protagonist of the Phocion landscapes invisible, and so constructing a narrative around the physical absence of its subject, Poussin was ...”

“... in Mogadishu but it doesn’t involve anything so prosaic as a cease in the firing. What it means in practice is no first use of artillery, a moratorium on heavy ordnance. It has not put an end to the shooting: thirty casualties a day are turning up at the couple of gamy hospitals in the city. Glancing through the rear windscreen, I see the Filipino ...”

“... and modern educated spoken English in England tends to be a stilted class-ridden affair by means of which speakers strive to assert or to conceal their origins. (Perhaps the hope for British poetry ought to lie in regional speech, and of course in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.) One might even hazard as a fourth reason that the university scene into ...”

“... perhaps, to the cruel though well-meaning Poor Law of 1834. In top-and-tail essays Asa Briggs and David Donnison make what they can of a disparate assembly which ranges from Josephine Butler and Charles Booth to R.I. Morant and William Beveridge. As Donnison points out, equality was seldom their explicit goal. Nor was the growth of a centralised bureaucratic ...”

“... people with no knowledge of notation to identify themes from classical music. He notated them by means of a dot (the initial note) followed by U (up), D (down) and R (repeated note). Thus the slow movement of Haydn’s ‘Surprise’ Symphony goes: ·R U R U R D U R D R D R D U R U R U R D U R D R U D. He then arranged the sequences in alphabetical ...”

“... its Viking history, ‘in search of characters for a documentary, the subject of which was by no means clear to me’. As one of his biographers, Otto Friedrich, comments, the subject was perfectly clear: Gould was simply fascinated by the idea of isolation and solitude, perhaps the major part of the North’s allure for artists. In 1998 I went to ...”

“... as well as a mathematical significance. Exactly one hundred years earlier, the mathematician David Hilbert had delivered a lecture in which he had identified what he took to be the (23 in his case) most important unsolved mathematical problems of his day. Hilbert’s problems were a spur to some of the most productive mathematical research of the 20th ...”

“... and law, but in his own day was a controversial figure. The Provençal rabbi Abraham ben David (‘Rabad’) criticised him for, among other things, his insistence that God is not embodied. After his death in 1204, Jews living in Montpellier helped persuade the Christian authorities to burn copies of his greatest philosophical work, The Guide to the ...”

“... in a 1973 issue of the journal Science, describes an experiment the American psychology professor David Rosenhan conducted with seven friends (three of them psychologists and one a psychiatrist), who presented themselves at the psychiatric emergency rooms of a range of state and poshly private hospitals and asylums. They had prepared themselves ...”

“... himself no longer. I was in Downing Street with the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser, David Manning; the overcoated figure bursting into our meeting was Jack Straw. He wanted to tell Manning that he had persuaded Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, to add Hamas to the EU list of terrorist movements. His tale of his conversion of Fischer ...”