“... intellectual and emotional energy, when he left Ireland and pursued a career in England. As David Bromwich has already pointed out, there is an English Burke whom O’Brien never makes known to his readers. He understands, and can excitingly depict, the oratory and politics of Burke’s House of Commons; but since he is intent on arguing that the ghosts ...”

“... to recognise that voters hankered after the New Look or ‘pleasure motoring’ ... Attlee still held to the old public school ideal, common among families with a hereditary commitment to the Empire or the Army, of a society dedicated to service rather than competition for wealth. History was not on his side. Cultural change was rapidly undermining the high ...”

“... from a group of people, a remarkable chorus, club or consensus composed of Robert Burns, David Hume and Henry Cockburn, while the nearby estate of Auchinleck, mentioned in an additional stanza contained in one version of the poem, was called ‘romantic’ by a son of the house, James Boswell. Kyle counts, then, as a highly romantic vicinity. But it ...”

“... or directed or narrated by people with a background in business or an interest in business think. David Brailsford, the general manager of Team Sky and the performance director of British Cycling – and therefore the man behind Britain’s eight gold medals in cycling at London 2012 and the Tour de France victories of Wiggins and Froome – studied sports ...”

“... country will tolerate such a conservative deal. On the same day as the European elections, Bremen held a vote, which brought another historic defeat for the SPD. Having ruled the city uninterruptedly since 1945, it took only 25 per cent of the vote. The ‘winner’ was the CDU. But it cannot govern alone, which makes the Greens the kingmakers. To the dismay ...”

“... and other pre-emptive acts of violence. Another neo-con, the New York Times columnist David Brooks, recently blasted the CIA’s ‘bloodless compilations of data by anonymous technicians’ and praised those analysts who make ‘novelistic judgments’ informed by ‘history, literature, philosophy and theology’. Rumsfeld’s war on the ...”

“... its truth carefully, since so much bad speculation about the genesis of 1984 has been built on it, held up the telling of a story and made the opening of my book hard to digest and contentious. Perhaps I should have ignored all those silly and arbitrary, or at least infinitely reversible, pseudo-Freudian short cuts, or looked at them in the light of Richard ...”

“... We learn a great deal about his visual passions, for the 17th-century Dutch painters, for Caspar David Friedrich (Two Men Contemplating the Moon was part of the inspiration for Waiting for Godot) and, supremely, Cézanne (a late self-portrait attracted the quintessentially Beckettian description ‘overwhelmingly sad. A blind broken old man’). Cronin, on ...”

“... the errant young man from the Singapore Stock Exchange, is interviewed in his Frankfurt prison by David Frost, the interview, made by Frost’s production company, broadcast by the BBC at ten this evening. The papers, which have had a preview, are full of Leeson’s self-justifications, but nobody seems to question the propriety of broadcasting such an ...”

“... opposite of what they mean, and it is this more than anything that makes the new Unionist leader David Trimble look so angry. When John Major told the House of Commons that it ‘would turn his stomach’ to negotiate with Gerry Adams, he meant exactly the opposite, and when this became clear, there was a fuss, but no one really minded too much because ...”

“... prices high and managers’ share options valuable. By 2002, only eight US corporations still held Moody’s highest, Aaa rating. Ratings help determine the costs faced by a corporation or government. The lower your rating, the higher the rate of interest you have to pay on your bonds and the more it costs you to service your debt, and this last can be a ...”

“... used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget that there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t . . . and that all those other people are fools … You’ll be thinking ...”

“... employment. Aimed primarily at Asia and Central/Eastern Europe, the scheme was commended by David Blunkett as proof that the Government was ‘delivering nothing less than one of the world’s most flexible modern work permit systems. To maintain a buoyant economy we need to ensure employers can quickly fill key posts where shortages exist.’ This ...”

“... one of the MPs who has taken the topic up at Parliamentary level is an antiabortion campaigner, David Alton. The stories the Romans told about the Christians have often been attributed to misunderstandings about theology, specifically, about the nature of the Eucharist. But Christian imagery, divorced from its conventional context, is startling: Abraham and ...”

“... More Cecil Beaton?’ Norman showed her the book he was looking at, this time something on David Hockney. She leafed through it, gazing unperturbed at young men’s bottoms hauled out of Californian swimming-pools or lying together on unmade beds. ‘Some of them,’ she said, ‘some of them don’t seem altogether finished. This one is quite ...”