“... would better describe the process. One of the exhibits at the Royal Academy, a picture called David between Saul and Jonathan, illustrates this very well. It was first attributed to Giorgione by the most influential Italian art historian of the last century, Roberto Longhi. In 1992 a letter about the picture Longhi wrote to the owner in 1944 was published ...”

“... doubts are ‘voxpopulated’, orders ‘spontaneified’, someone arrives ‘envehicled’. David Brookshaw’s dexterity achieves a seemingly effortless fit with Couto’s idiosyncrasies. A virginal heiress, Temporina, ‘hadn’t been legged over, but at least she was worth a legacy’; the ex-Marxist Jonas calls his black market deals ‘my ...”

“... misogynist central character, John, is as compromised and unappealing as the disgraced David Lurie. But perhaps Youth is being taken too seriously, and we are meant to mock this grim young man and the Conradian title that portentously frames his rite of passage. A good deal depends on whether we read Youth as fiction or autobiography. It was ...”

“... 1974 and 1976 agreements were signed between Israel, Syria and Egypt, culminating in the Camp David Accords signed by Israel and Egypt in 1978. Camp David would form the template for all subsequent negotiations, including the Oslo peace process of the 1990s.Since its inception, Israel had refused to acknowledge the ...”

“... the enviable trick Of barely needing to chat up the chick – From Warren Beatty back to ruddy David. But why the broads latch on to the one bloke Remains what it has always been, a riddle. Byron though famous was both fat and broke While Casanova was a standing joke, His wig awry, forever on the fiddle. Mozart made Juan warble but so what? In Don Giovanni ...”

“... the dividend of de Gaulle’s 1960s policy make-over – an Arab dividend above all. This is what David Styan, in an unpublished thesis on Franco-Iraqi relations, has called the ‘aggressively mercantilist’ phase of Gaullist foreign policy. By the mid-1970s a reactor in Osirak looked no worse than a reactor in Dimona. Chirac was Giscard’s Prime Minister ...”

“... just look what happened to Star Wars. Star Wars, along with Jaws, is regularly cited, not least by David Thomson, as the film that ‘killed the movies’. Glenn Kelly’s answer, in his introduction to A Galaxy Not So Far Away: Writers and Artists on 25 Years of ‘Star Wars’ (Allison and Busby, £9.99), is: ‘Get over it, Dad.’ This selective quotation ...”

“... cadillac, alongside the cans of Diet Coke.The LRB has received a sheet of puffs for The Chief, David Nasaw’s Life of William Randolph Hearst (Gibson Square, £9.99), including one from Conrad Black in the Scotsman. That would be the same Conrad Black who wrote the book’s foreword. A helpful yellow post-it note reads: ‘FYI Conrad Black in the ...”

“... a setting all calculated artifice. The analogy was brought to mind two weeks ago by the death of David Kelly, a real event which intruded in a shocking way on the calculated artificiality of the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee before which he’d been called, a body convened on the face of it to determine whether the Government had earlier misled all ...”

“... certainly sound more gung-ho to applaud the ‘tough message’ that the courts are conveying, as David Cameron has done, or to say along with John Thornhill, the chairman of the Magistrates Association, that the sheer volume of riot-related criminality justifies disproportionate punishments. But there is a dangerous whiff of bullshit accompanying the ...”

“... to take his comrade’s place at roll call, much as Charles Clarke has done following the lovesick David Blunkett’s escape from Cabinet – a strange business on many levels, Blunkett’s repressive record as home secretary aside. For a start, it’s hard to imagine a more venial form of corruption than merely speeding along someone’s visa application. And ...”

“... Factory: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank (Simon and Schuster, £12.99), David Plotz investigates the Repository for Germinal Choice that was founded in California in 1980 by Robert Graham, an ‘eccentric millionaire’, and closed in 1999. The only prize-winner to fess up to having donated was William Shockley, who invented the ...”

“... action figures exist only as bits and bobs in cyberspace’. The man responsible for the site, David Gauntlett, who teaches at the Institute of Communications Studies in Leeds, is clearly a bit of a Giddens fan: note the description of Modernity and Self-Identity as ‘outstanding’. You can also get (if you download and print them) Theory.org.uk ...”

“... his ploughman’s lunch. Their melancholia, though perhaps not their complaceny, is well suited to David Frith’s entertaining and moving new book Silence of the Heart: Cricket Suicides (Mainstream, £14.99). Why is it, Frith asks, that more cricketers top themselves than any other sportsmen? The cases are legion. Take the legendary A.E. Stoddart, the finest ...”

“... Becoming a British citizen is a significant life event,’ the former home secretary David Blunkett writes. ‘The government intends to make gaining British citizenship meaningful and celebratory rather than simply a bureaucratic process.’ The quote is not from Blunkett’s diaries but from the funniest book currently available in the English language, published by the Home Office, and called Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship ...”