“... may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for ...”

“... world’s population that doesn’t live in Cheam. This paper wasn’t invented by Dacre but by David English, variously described as the best editor on Fleet Street and the biggest liar since Herodotus. (English once invented a whole interview with Betty Ford and on another occasion pretended to have been in Dallas the day Kennedy was shot.) By the end of ...”

“... but announced in late April that he wouldn’t be speaking. Another GB News regular, the historian David Starkey, did appear, telling the audience that anti-racist campaigners ‘only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture’. GB News has recorded huge losses but its owners seem unconcerned. Its payroll features several Tory MPs on decent ...”

“... The publisher’s launching party for David Cannadine’s Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy in the Moses Room of the House of Lords on 22 October was the third occasion on which I had been inside that curious place since taking my seat as a hereditary member of it. The Moses Room is evidently so called because its walls depict, in tableaux more impressive for their size than their quality, the appropriate Old Testament scenes ...”

“... laws of vocal harmony, imaginative portrayal, and arrangement of the details of thought.’ For David Robinson, writing in the Twenties and reprinted in the Sixties, the ‘perfection’ of Sappho’s verse was clear enough proof of her unblemished character. He was perhaps unusual in his unshakable confidence that (at least in the case of female ...”

“... Foreign Parts. It bridges writing as different as the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David Kinloch, and the fiction of Christopher Whyte or A.L. Kennedy. Some of these poets and novelists are wary of each other. Jamie recently refused to read with Irvine Welsh because of what she saw as the misogyny of one of his short stories. Yet even such ...”

“... brutal, irreverent message had got through, they laughed and laughed. Unlike his two successors, David Steel and Paddy Ashdown, Thorpe was, in fact, a pretty considerable Commons performer. His natural habitat, though, was the platform and, after he became Party leader in 1967, his annual address at what was still then called the Liberal Assembly took its ...”

“... in the Liberal State to the collection of (mostly already published) essays on similar themes by David Raphael, Justice and Liberty. The clarity quotient is much higher and the pretentiousness quotient much lower; there is also a much deeper knowledge of the history of moral and political philosophy behind his pronouncements, which gives them a weight to ...”

“... to questions of this sort in the new study of the principal architect involved. Sir Gilbert Scott. David Cole looks at 19th-century architecture as if from the drawing-office of the architect: commissions appear (their source and significance is not questioned); the architect provides a design, supervises construction and moves on to the next job. The story is ...”

“... The story can fairly be summarised since its meaning and power are vested in the telling. It is David Plante’s manner that will attract or alienate readers. The Country exemplifies a mode of contemporary writing almost sufficiently distinct to constitute a genre. The defining characteristic of a novel of this kind is that it seems to consist substantially ...”

“... has been published by Granada publishers to capitalise on the success of the series. The author is David Mitchell, a writer not previously known in this field. His mission was to incorporate, not only the material used in the television series, but the numerous other interviews which the producers could not use. Granada’s publicity team add the quite false ...”

“... this hotchpotch of a party will expire before the next general election. Incidentally, how much David Owen must be regretting that the SDP is still alive. If he had remained in the Labour Party nothing could have prevented his becoming its leader. Perhaps the Executive Committee of the Labour Party could dispatch a telegram saying: ‘Come back, ...”

“... process, the first portrayer of society in terms that Adam Smith might and Karl Marx did approve. David Brown makes the academic case admirably. He begins by modestly disclaiming originality: he is developing insights put forward by others in recent years, and only applying them more carefully to a selection of the major novels. This is a service which it ...”

“... within the upper echelons of the media. In one extraordinary incident in the early Fifties, David Schoenbrun, the distinguished CBS correspondent in Paris, had to use all his influence to get Balmain to open his store on Bastille Day so that Jack Benny’s wife, Mary Livingston, could buy two quarts of Vent Vert perfume. ‘Bill Paley said you could do ...”

“... unite society, but which might equally tear it apart. Do we possess writing or does it possess us? David Olson’s The World on Paper explores the relationship between thought and writing from a different perspective. Olson is a cognitive scientist, and a brave man. ‘Contrary to writers from Aristotle to Saussure,’ he tells us towards the end of the ...”