“... Indeed, he complained about plans to publish some of the correspondence of his late friend David Hume, because it would encourage hacks and hucksters to ‘set about rummaging the cabinets of all those who had ever received a scrap of paper from him. Many things would be published not fit to see the light to the great mortification of all those who ...”

“... other than human life. There’s also a masterly volume of summary and analysis by the editor, David Fisher, who dislikes paragraphs and believes in calling a bastard a bastard. Inevitably, such an exhaustive work of reference answers questions nobody is ever likely to ask. As you leaf through the 6000 double-columned pages you are sometimes overwhelmed by ...”

“... all the many commentators in the West who had something to say about the Hebron events, only one, David Shipler of the New York Times, made a connection between Baruch Goldstein, political Judaism and Zionism itself. All of them, he said correctly, are aspects of each other: they can’t be broken up into smaller, separate units called ‘single deranged ...”

“... with about as much in common as Michael Howard and Dennis Skinner. One of them is described by David Solkin in his Painting for Money, reviewed in these pages last year by Ronald Paulson. Solkin’s Hogarth is an ambitious social climber, determined to efface the memory of his beginnings as an apprentice in the trade of silver-engraving, and to become a ...”

“... of 17th-century genre paintings, William van Haecht’s The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Gheest. A gentleman is admiring a hunting scene while his companions study bronzes by Giambologna or gesture towards Classical statuary. With this jacket, one would be forgiven for thinking that the book will address such interesting topics as how works of art were ...”

“... John Horne Tooke enjoyed two distinct political careers, under two different names: as John Horne in the age of the American Revolution, and as John Horne Tooke in that of the French Revolution. In both identities he attracted notoriety or fame, according to the prejudices of commentators. Extolled as a champion of liberty and mocked as a mischief-maker in countless cartoons and ballads, pamphlets and newspapers, Horne Tooke was a man who was well known in his own lifetime, but who made no permanent contribution to the cause of British liberty ...”

“... at Trinity College, Dublin, making a reasonable shot at modern Irish. He had the background of a gentleman and the instincts of an aesthete: spiritualism and theosophy were more in his line than the activities of the Land League. Like Yeats, Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde, he brooded over the ‘spirit of the nation’ and thought it would be a fine thing to ...”

“... this period; and so did men of the calibre of Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Henry Grattan, David Ricardo, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Wilberforce. ‘What a mercy to have been born an Englishman, in the 18th century,’ mused the latter, and if one had the right class and gender and a taste for rhetoric, flair and professionalism in ...”

“... excuse for befogging the reader. Montaillou was, last October, the subject of an attack by David Herlihy in Social History on the grounds of inaccurate handling of its source material. The specific accusation was of mistranslation from the Latin, and of the irrelevant introduction of material about incidents elsewhere. There is also the problem of ...”

“... should have known better’ becomes a somewhat wearisome refrain. Hospital administrator David Jacobson ‘worked out his own reasons why he was not at risk ... he was fulfilling a worthwhile function which was appreciated by the Lebanese’; Frank Reed ‘felt he was safe because he was married to a Lebanese’; Jo Cicippio ‘thought he was safe so ...”

“... beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the distressed. Sterne assured his readers that his purpose in A Sentimental Journey (1768) ‘was to teach us to love the world and our fellow ...”

“... about the brief moment of joy he felt when he saw the planes fly into the twin towers – ‘David beating Goliath’ – at which point ‘you’ (Liev Schreiber) turns firm and Bruce Willis-like and says: ‘and you wonder why your family is being threatened.’ Changez is seen giving a lecture at Lahore University and bellowing ‘We will wipe the ...”

“... Graveney. D’Oliveira saw Cowdrey, his captain in the Australian tests, as the perfect English gentleman, and describes staying in his house after the tour was called off. He was sure Cowdrey had fought for his selection. Oborne gives a different picture, of a nice guy who found it hard to tell uncomfortable truths and tended not to deliver on his ...”

“... Broadway, putting her stamp on the musicals Carousel, One Touch of Venus, Bloomer Girl, Brigadoon, Gentleman Prefer Blondes and 110 in the Shade. She also wrote 11 books, among them a monumental biography of her colleague and confidante Martha Graham. Dance to the Piper was her first in 1951 and told the story, as she put it, ‘of an American dancer, a ...”

“... an eye kept on Jim Callaghan when he was Foreign Secretary and therefore placed the reliable David Ennals as Number Two in the Foreign Office, so Mrs Thatcher wanted to keep her potential successor, Michael Heseltine, ‘under surveillance’. Readers of the London Review of Books, if they are interested, must really look for themselves at Ponting’s ...”