“... thereby greatly weakened. The sources of Thomson’s style are well documented by Charles McKean, David Walker and David Watkin. It is clear that he looked closely at the works of the vigorous school of northern Classicism, and he admitted to having certain favourites. In an 1866 pamphlet attacking Scott’s Gothic designs ...”

“... to the Indian population, though often through the efforts of Indian doctors and philanthropists. David Arnold’s book covers the early 19th century in greater detail and includes a chapter on the anguished responses to the first cholera pandemic of 1818-25. He provides fascinating material on the period when Europeans were trying to come to grips with ...”

“... self-important, fussy, but sensitive to beauty, romance and alien cultures – who is uppermost in David Gilmour’s splendid new biography. Gilmour punctures the myth of the insufferably arrogant and despotically ‘un-English’ Curzon perpetuated by society gossip and by the hostile accounts of the Beaverbrook circle. Attendants at his Indian court did not ...”

“... figure eventually has to let him go, triggering a suicidal binge. Although largely a creation of David O. Selznick, a producer with a predilection for sentimental narratives, What Price Hollywood? draws on the career and decline into alcoholism of the silent era director Lowell Sherman, who himself plays the dissipated drunkard Maximillian Cady. Cady and his ...”

“... and Mann thought they were doing, but it is what the manner of their directing solemnly suggests. David Fincher’s Seven is rather different, since it has a clever plot and enough violent action for a whole series of movies, and certainly isn’t an essay. But it doesn’t see itself as just gory entertainment either, and it, too, is keen on the big ...”

“... old George’ of Poplar had come to personify grassroots Labour in much the same way as David Blunkett of the ‘socialist republic’ of South Yorkshire did in the late 1970s. Shepherd sees Lansbury’s evolution into a Cockney icon as a parable of the working-class boy made good by a conversion to socialism. But some of the photographs which ...”

“... and Thackeray were pall-bearers at Jerrold’s funeral and, according to their contemporary David Masson, ‘the three do form a triad so that it is hardly possible to discuss the merits of any one of them without referring to the other two.’ Posterity has found it very possible. And, richly informative as Slater’s biography is (he has been at it ...”

“... reproach. Progressive rabbis may not be allowed to disturb the even tenor of their lives. In 1988, David Forman, a Reform rabbi, founded Rabbis for Human Rights, an organisation which has been an advocate for the rights of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, though its effectiveness is limited. At the beginning of October, it helped to rebuild homes in ...”

“... the homosexual artist, had converged to discuss painting and the human condition. The thought that David Sylvester and Francis Bacon were caught up in this dialogue seemed at once daunting and salutary to some of us then learning to paint in the same town. Their Interviews – first published in 1975 – conveyed such unassailable aplomb. ‘All art has now ...”

“... is heard to mutter: ‘You’ll be wanting the gold fillings out of their teeth next.’ 2) The David Irving libel trial in February. Reading from the transcript of an interview with Irving on Australian television, Richard Rampton QC, barrister for the defence, asks why Irving had said that the idea of black men playing cricket for England made him feel ...”

“... As you’ve probably begun to see,’ David Foster Wallace writes in Everything and More, ‘Aristotle manages to be sort of grandly and breathtakingly wrong, always and everywhere, when it comes to infinity.’ A much milder version of this antagonism towards Aristotle appears in both Brian Clegg’s Brief History of Infinity and Robert and Ellen Kaplan’s The Art of the Infinite ...”

“... parts of the Pentateuch were not written by Moses and that some of the psalms were not composed by David … Paine took particular pleasure in some of the Bishop’s curious admissions. For example, The Age of Reason questioned whether God really commanded that all men and married women among the Midianites should be slaughtered and their maidens ...”

“... Nobel laureates Steven Weinberg and Kenneth Wilson, and their fellow physicists Jean Bricmont and David Mermin – with a selective group of the targets of their criticism: sociologists and social historians of science rather than, for example, literary or cultural studies theorists. The debate is joined also by a number of natural scientists and others who ...”

“... which willy-nilly drove this forward, in the long run did the party more harm than good. David Cameron is almost certainly aware of this but clearly isn’t sure what he can do about it. Once again, the problem is likely to be solved – to the extent that it can be – by accumulating error on the government’s part. The Tories just have to make ...”

“... mid-century decades of the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny and the wars of Prussian expansion that David French picks up the story. It was evident to the more thoughtful that army and society were not well related to one another, and that the British army, which remained, to an alarming degree, a body apart, contrasted painfully with the efficient citizen ...”