“... gone wrong, renewed, consummated, young, forbidden, discovered, doomed, forgotten, repressed. David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars is the latest literary bestseller to hit the US (and, remarkably, the UK). Its surprising success owes much to the strength of its narrative, and something to the dynamics of contemporary bookselling and the vogue of the ...”

“... In a preliminary chapter called ‘Curriculum Vitae’ David Sylvester explains that he became interested in art when, at 17, he was fascinated by a black and white reproduction of a Matisse. He at once began to paint in oils, but soon discovered that he lacked talent and began to write about art instead, devoting himself thenceforth to the black and white of the page ...”

“... everything from dactyls to death, geography spans everything from sand dunes to marriage rituals. David Harvey, the doyen of radical geographers, writes of material limits in a language which disdains all bounds, crossing from Spinoza to scallop fishing, the architecture of Baltimore to the circulation of capital. Justice, Nature and the Geography of ...”

“... the terms of the Agreement, despite the defection at that point of one of their key negotiators, David Trimble and his colleagues were clearly influenced by a private letter they received from Tony Blair, saying that he interpreted the Agreement to mean that decommissioning ‘should’ begin straightaway. This was, however, a unilateral statement that could ...”

“... Paris Commune. Charles X appears only as the monarch who made Gros a baron and refused to allow David back from exile. The Siege of Paris in 1870 is merely an aggravation of Edmond Goncourt’s grief at losing his brother. This elimination of historical detail corresponds to the idea that Romanticism, once detached from specific causes – the Terror and ...”

“... a warmer, more enthusiastic man than he is allowed to appear here. Interviewing the 80-year-old C.F.A. Voysey (a hero to both Betjeman and Pevsner), he lamented the lack of appreciation, the silence that had ‘descended on the life of so outstanding and so lovable an artist’. Pevsner was not cold, but he occasionally revealed a deep pessimism. He pinned ...”

“... the Oslo Accord suggest that much the same sort of thing was said there, while leaks from the Camp David summit in 2000 describe similar exchanges between Clinton, Barak and Arafat. In fact, the Israeli tone and attitude have barely changed since British despair led to the Palestine question being transferred to the UN at the end of the Second World War. The ...”

“... their doubts about the desirability and viability of such a strategy. One of the many virtues of David Armitage’s Ideological Origins of the British Empire is that its author is markedly transatlantic in background, and consequently able to understand and mediate between these very different intellectual sensibilities and scepticisms. Trained at Princeton ...”

“... of the varieties of representation of the artist from the Reformation and Renaissance to, say, David Hockney. Van Dyck made numerous self-portraits. His friend Rubens’s picture of him confirms the likeness Van Dyck made in his own work. Rubens’s self-portrait is both a picture of a successful man, and an advertisement for himself. He has his head ...”

“... and dominated popular understanding of the nations’s common past for more than half a century. David Cannadine’s characteristically spirited and combative study is more than just an intellectual biography: it is a work of piety, advocacy and passion. He uses the corpus of Trevelyan’s historical writings over fifty years – Wycliffe, Garibaldi, the ...”

“... patient is Jung’s, a disturbed woman not at all underplayed by Keira Knightley. The movie – David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton – opens with a view of her struggling against her captors in a horse-drawn coach (the date is 1904) and being delivered to a posh sanatorium in Switzerland. She goes rigid when ...”

“... is that nothing is just what an android needs, a mark of real class. Michael Fassbender plays David, the android, with terrific, elegant style, not as if he were Peter O’Toole but as if he liked Peter O’Toole – a fine distinction. His uniform makes him look like a prisoner rather than a servant, and the effect is that of one of the more likeable ...”

“... is shared by an improbable international coalition of coup supporters, ranging from Tony Blair and David Brooks (who says Egyptians lack even ‘the most basic mental ingredients’ for democracy) to Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the Israeli security establishment and, above all, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which immediately offered $12 billion in ...”

“... academics will have a strong financial incentive to become liars. Despite the doubts expressed by David Willetts, the minister for universities and science, the institutional momentum behind it has proven to be unstoppable: Hefce recently announced that the measure will go ahead unchanged. ‘Impact’ will account for 20 per cent of an academic’s ...”

“... back leg straight? How could the sculptor who created such finely articulated hands for his bronze David, and for the marble bust of a woman holding flowers, have been responsible for these wooden extremities, poorly adapted for their purpose and clumsily repeated? Parts of Tobias and the Angel are, however, of outstanding quality: Tobias’s lively features ...”