“... told Randal, ‘any interpretation of the tacit understanding is correct.’ The Red Lines held until the summer of 1982. In that time, Israel sought to bring three groups under its wing, and to use them against its enemies in Lebanon – i.e. the Syrians and the Palestinians. These groups were the Shias, the southern Christians and the northern ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Decadent theology. He presented Christ as a divine dandy whose greatest work was himself. He held that ‘what is termed Sin is an essential element of Progress,’ and found in the rigour of the confessional a model for his poetic autobiography, De Profundis. If only Wilde would rewrite all of the Bible, Max Beerbohm joked of Salome, there would be an ...”

“... and she went in search of him. At a pub near Avondale Square she met a friend of Ronnie’s called David. He said he’d been with Ronnie the day before and that Ronnie was in bed the last time he saw him. (The coroner would later describe this man as an ‘unsavoury witness’ without detailing why.) Mrs Pinn, in company with another boy from the bar, went to ...”

“... the same from one abbey to the next.2 April, Yorkshire. Come across a thirty-year-old note from David Vaisey, at that time a postgraduate student at Bodley and subsequently its Librarian. The note just has a crudely drawn swastika and the slogan ‘A.L. Raus’.14 April. Pass two slightly cheeky-looking middle-aged businessmen in Hanover Square, one of whom ...”

“... Guardian. He said it would come from journalists he’d worked with there. He was obsessed with David Leigh and Nick Davies, two of the main reporters. ‘Davies is extremely hostile to me,’ Assange said. ‘The Guardian basically double-crossed the organisation in the worst way.’ (The Guardian denies this.) ‘We left them with a cache of cables – to ...”

“... surprised when it was trounced at the polls in 2010.Three years​ before the financial crisis, David Cameron had been elected to lead the Conservatives, promising to make them a more appealing alternative to Labour after the serial fiascos of his predecessors. Unlike them, he was not a Eurosceptic and made sure he got into office without damaging ...”

“... rooms); the Battle of Santiago (hosts Chile against Italy in 1962, characterised by the BBC’s David Coleman as ‘the most stupid, appalling, disgusting and disgraceful exhibition of football in the history of the game’); die Wasserschlacht (the water battle) of 1974, when West Germany, the hosts, beat Poland on a waterlogged pitch that nullified the ...”

“... falls across them was felt already in the Enlightenment. The first major writer on the subject, David Hume, introduced it with the caveat that ‘the vulgar are apt to carry all national characters to extremes.’ But that was not a reason to deny their existence. ‘Men of sense condemn these undistinguishing judgments; though, at the same time, they allow ...”

“... one of them. Writing to Luise Kautsky on 24 November 1917 from Breslau prison, where she had been held because of her opposition to the war, she praised Kautsky for still holding on to the ‘groping, searching, anxious’ young woman inside her – Kautsky was 53 at the time. When Kautsky visited Luxemburg in prison in May, her inner torment, her ...”

“... to perform the alchemy, and to get a licence you needed help from the top. The Washington Post’s David Hoffman, in the best journalistic account of the heroic age of Russian capitalism, The Oligarchs, found an old professor, the head of a giant research institute, who remembered Khodorkovsky and another young man coming to him to ask for some start-up ...”

“... normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of decades, the ...”

“... strange being alone with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in ...”

“... for it.’ This from the author of The Logic of Political Economy, an exposition of the ideas of David Ricardo, which John Stuart Mill, for one, thought ‘very successful’. He wouldn’t have needed to owe rent on multiple rooms and houses, had it not been that the landlords held his drafts and papers hostage as ...”

“... ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background’, followed by a plain grilled loup and no ...”