“... all others. It was founded in Oxford by Edward Lean, the younger brother of the film director David Lean, and was dedicated to the reading and discussion of creative work in progress. When Lean graduated, Lewis took it over. The group was for men only. (Dorothy L. Sayers, a keen Christian and an admirer of Lewis, was excluded.) At first, meetings were ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... Bon Marché, named after Boucicaut’s Paris store although it was founded by a Londoner called David Lewis. Between 1920 and 1924 it was given an art deco makeover and was regarded as ‘one of the finest examples of modern architecture that Liverpool possesses’. There were also Owen Owen and Lewis’s, which ...”

“... controls, withdrawal from the EEC and import controls. Much of this wasn’t new. The historian David Edgerton has described the AES as a ‘modernising, techno-nationalist, productionist, autarchic programme’ that was basically complementary to Harold Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ agenda. It was, however, profoundly out of step with the European Community ...”

“... Early in the first part of his three-volume, 1500-page Portrait of the Man and His Work, A. David Moody, in a section of a chapter also entitled ‘Suburban Prejudice’, cites the same story, but points out that in the summers of 1902 and 1903 Homer Pound and his wife let their house to ‘Mr W.B. Hackenburg, president of the Jewish Hospital ...”

“... premonitory of the coming confrontation with the Heath Government, he and a colleague named Owen Briscoe had swept the poll and begun to take over the district. After spending some quality time down the pit and taking the odd sounding at the club, I thought I realised that even the highly taciturn and conservative Yorkshire miners were ready for a ...”

“... writing has a lyrical passion in argument that I found irresistible,’ says no less a judge than David Malouf. ‘I couldn’t put it down.’ Malouf being no fool, I am reluctant to suggest that the reason he couldn’t put the book down was that it is so full of hot air it kept springing back up again. Reluctant, but compelled. Lyrically passionate writing ...”

“... now admired as a kind of wartime reincarnation of Christopher Smart. Gurney trained as a musician, David Jones and Isaac Rosenberg as artists; they all served in the ranks and were excluded from the mainstream of literary life after the war – Rosenberg was dead, Gurney mad, Jones given to arcane pursuits. Once again, it was the public school volunteer ...”

“... furthered this work, and from a scholarly point of view usefully complemented each other: W.J.B. Owen (1967) used the 1798 text, Derek Roper (1968) used 1805, while Brett and Jones (1963) combined 1798 with Vol. II of 1800. Now Mason appears, to reissue the text still available in Roper’s version – and what else? He might have gone in for a critical ...”

“... between them) that can be found in thinkers from Isaac Newton and John Locke to Adam Smith and David Hume. What Kind of Creatures Are We? reprints a series of lectures Chomsky delivered at Columbia University, with a lucid foreword by the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami. The second lecture, ‘What Can We Understand?’, opens with an avowal of ‘the new ...”

“... Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books,’ David Dumville wrote in 1977; and he was backed up by, for instance, J.N.L. Myres in 1986: ‘No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.’ In his new book, Nicholas Higham cites neither opinion but certainly ...”

“... salmonella’). Then there is the long line of sex-scandal casualties: Cecil Parkinson, Tim Yeo, David Mellor (greatly exaggerated, but not his only alleged misdemeanour), Hartley Booth, Michael Brown (though he is a borderline case, since he resigned from office while denying allegations that he had had a homosexual relationship). We should also not forget ...”

“... James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera ...”

“... Where they primarily document the project’s disintegration between the 2017 and 2019 elections, Owen Jones describes the emergence of Corbynism from the exhausted managerialism of late New Labour, gives a defence of its politics and examines its weaknesses. Both books will be painful and often infuriating reading for anyone who was at all sympathetic to ...”

“... or less severely. Oddly, the war doesn’t figure all that much in Graves’s early poetry. While Owen and Sassoon and Rosenberg found their styles transformed by the need to register the overwhelming horror and pity of the trenches, Graves seems to have felt poetry and war in some measure antithetical. Only a couple, such as ‘A Dead Boche’ (‘he scowled ...”