“... providers, who in contrast will be nurtured into the new terrain’. On this matter at least, David Willetts, the minister responsible for higher education, has been clear: ‘The biggest lesson I have learned is that the most powerful driver of reform is to let new providers into the system.’ Note that word ‘reform’: the implication is that there ...”

“... probably be committed to housework. For people who can pay others to do that, voluntary work is a means of self-definition, a route to status, to MBE or DBE. One of several reasons why P.G. Wodehouse is rather a subversive writer is that much of his best work (he worked assiduously all his long life, and loved it) presents characters who don’t work and ...”

“... and Milan (2019). These shows, and the books that accompanied them, have been an important means of consolidating our knowledge of Antonello and appreciating the quality of his work. Only two of the books – from the Met show in New York and the more recent Palazzo Reale exhibition in Milan – are currently available in English. (It is a particular ...”

“... million marching in Hong Kong was even more significant than one million demonstrating in Beijing. David Owen warned that the involvement of the colony could be ‘very dangerous’. In early June a further demonstration damaged property and the Hong Kong riot police were sent in promptly. It was alleged, in language reminiscent of Beijing, that ‘criminal ...”

“... as far back as the 12th century. So there is nothing very modern about worrying about what it means to be modern, and even if you think that being modern requires a total rejection of the past, like Tzara or Artaud, you become dependent on the past if only because you need to have it around to reject. As Paul de Man observed in his subtle essay ...”

“... craft,’ and thus he is often ‘reduced to feeling it as an indulgence’. By craft, Josipovici means something like that of the stonemasons who built the great European cathedrals, or the way Shakespeare treated his own writing, or Bach his composing: as activities related to and requested by the community, often collaborative, artisanal or ...”

“... speaker at this rally, supposedly organised to fly the flag of resistance to state oppression, was David Icke.Icke was a BBC sports presenter in the 1980s, smooth, bland and remarkable only for a certain glassy coldness of manner. Before that he’d been a professional footballer. At a time when Britain had a handful of TV channels, everyone knew his ...”

“... David Ben-Gurion​ , the founder of the state of Israel, was brooding, explosive, often on the verge of collapse: every obstacle he faced was a ‘catastrophe’. He dabbled in mysticism, consulted fortune-tellers, claimed to see flying saucers, and lived according to his whims. At one point he went on an unannounced holiday from his duties as prime minister to take driving lessons on the French Riviera; on another occasion, he spent a week studying Buddhism in Burma, and tried to persuade his teachers that he’d stumbled on a contradiction in their doctrine no one else had unearthed ...”

“... Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act received royal assent. It ordered a halt to the existing means for dealing with crimes committed during the conflict in Northern Ireland between the late 1960s and 1998. Criminal investigations, inquests and complaints about police conduct were to be abandoned or wound up within a few months; no new civil claims for ...”

“... a sizeable proportion of the detailed evidence we have about him dates from May and June 1593. For David Riggs, coming to the subject of Marlowe after writing Ben Jonson: A Life (1989), the paucity of material must have been fairly dismaying. The long-lived Jonson went out of his way to make things easy for biographers, leaving an extensive paper trail ...”

“... probably the most important book yet to appear in the dissident-Communist perspective. Fortunately David Fernbach’s translation makes it accessible (apart from a few Volapük lapses like ‘genial’ for génial) and copes ruggedly with the steeper philosophical faces. The perspective itself is questionable, however. Without objecting for a moment to the ...”

“... Organised crime is a paradigm for success in America, business and fortune are crime by other means. But the bounce and orchestration of the tune, which we hear before we hear any of the lyrics, tell another story, suggest dance and pleasure, the good life, loud and unapologetic. Or they would suggest this if they were not synchronised with the slamming ...”

“... which was deplored even at the time of the centenary of publication 38 years ago, when Elizabeth David pointed out that the currently available Mrs Beeton didn’t contain a single recipe from the original. That this is an odd state of affairs does not of itself make a facsimile of the 1861 book an interesting object. People buy and use the modern Mrs Beeton ...”

“... other than supportive of slavery – if not in principle then as an existing institution – which means that the black figures shackled to his monument can the more aptly be regarded as slaves.This was certainly the response of Herman Melville, who visited Liverpool in 1839 and wrote about the monument a decade later in his autobiographical novel ...”