“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and out of date.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Ali’s latest book is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power. David Bromwich Like the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, the rockets from Gaza were a choice of tactics of a spectacular vengefulness. The spectacle was greater than the damage: no Israeli had been killed by a rocket before the IDF launched their ...”

“... of setting off on an unlimited advance through Europe. Conceding that Stalin’s policy was by no means peaceful, accommodating and respectful of the security interests of others, Mastny argues that ‘neither had it been as unequivocally bent on unlimited expansion as the West was inclined to believe.’ In one sense it no longer much matters: deterrence ...”

“... The first looks much more dubious. Understandably perhaps, Miller never tries to define what he means by ‘bourgeois society’, which allows him to credit it with whatever characteristics suit his immediate purpose. These can be rather odd. ‘Paternalism that encouraged thrift, that sought to broaden the employees’ minds, to refine their ...”

“... the Russians will refuse him a visa. Two of the essays deal with Soviet relations with the West. David Holloway rightly attributes the troubles of détente to the two sides’ inability to agree on what it should mean and, in particular, to the Americans’ insistence that the Soviets ‘restrain their efforts to increase Soviet influence in the world’, a ...”

“... gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic struck them as fairly ...”

“... are not the end of the book. We turn the page and read a quotation from the American novelist David Markson: ‘Or was it possibly nothing more than a fundamentally recognisable genre all the while, no matter what Writer averred? Nothing more or less than a read?’ We can take the question as referring both to the described movie and to the describing ...”

“... 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 ...”