“... Hitler to attack first, as he had done in Poland. Perhaps the best de-mythologiser is Alec Campbell in a fine essay on the Anglo-American policy of unconditional surrender. Here there are two sets of myth-makers. The first set attack the policy as an ill-considered decision which prolonged the war. For did it not dishearten the German officer ...”

“... of superiority to fashion, publicity, even print itself. Sterne affected no such loftiness. Ian Campbell Ross’s new biography provides an introductory cameo of Sterne’s triumph of self-marketing. He made himself available to his admirers, the measure and embodiment of his fictional imagination. After a week he was writing home to say he was ‘engaged ...”

“... for New Times’ – a general political statement or programme – and a fable for the 1990s by David Edgar. The book is long, and since several contributors are responsible for more than one essay, there is a good deal of repetition. Tighter editorial control would have done no harm, though that might have been construed as inhibiting the openness of the ...”

“... the field are completely bald: the ref, Pierluigi Collina (alopecia); Rio Ferdinand (fashion); Sol Campbell (ditto); Danny Mills (male pattern baldness plus shaving); Juan Sebastian Verón (fashion); Trevor Sinclair (fashion). Four of the Argentine players have absurd poodle perms: Pochettino (who gives away the crucial penalty), Placente, Sorín, Ortega. But ...”

“... kept us all ablaze these last few weeks and months. Bella Caledonia, Wee Ginger Dug, Rev. Stuart Campbell, Alec Finlay, Wheelie Bins for Yes – a cataract of stuff. God knows, in my hours online I wandered down some peculiar byways (the Spectator comments pages). The Better Together ‘Patronising Lady’ advert kept us entertained for ages. (Watch the ...”

“... of the gab. At a time when Dublin audiences were content to see ‘Mde Rejane in Ibsen, Mrs P. Campbell in Sudermann, Olga Netherstole in Sapho, etc’, as he told Stephen MacKenna, Synge wanted to interest them in unsqueamish plays of rural life, visions of the Aran Islands, the sexual loneliness, the provenance of fear and joylessness and ...”

“... Should​ the voters have known better? The modestly obscure Orange Book of 2004, edited by David Laws, later briefly chief secretary to the Treasury in the 2010 coalition, with contributions from Clegg, Vince Cable and Chris Huhne, did stress free market and non-statist solutions to problems of public policy – in deliberate contrast to the ...”

“... which was deplored even at the time of the centenary of publication 38 years ago, when Elizabeth David pointed out that the currently available Mrs Beeton didn’t contain a single recipe from the original. That this is an odd state of affairs does not of itself make a facsimile of the 1861 book an interesting object. People buy and use the modern Mrs Beeton ...”

“... the abominable to the merely unsavoury.In the case of Holocaust denial – the crime for which David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison and banned from returning to Austria – the fear of contagion in some countries is based on rational horror instructed by recent experience. That is the argument for making an exception to the belief that the ...”

“... here rather than an error. Still, I don’t think we need to see Joyce as being disingenuous – David Greetham wonders about this in an essay in a booklet accompanying the new edition of Finnegans Wake – since we know what he could do with bits and scraps. In his letter he continues: ‘But then I never read Rabelais either though nobody will believe ...”

“... and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (whose eponymous antihero worked in PR). Emerging stars like David Ogilvy and Norman B. Norman publicised the ad man’s mystique of deep creative force, genius and restraint, as an up-to-date alternative to the old market barker’s persistence. Industry opened its purses to pay for strange approaches (Louis Cheskin’s ...”

“... with Brussels and the EU 27, reporting back directly not to his own secretary of state, David Davis, but to the prime minister? The magnitude of Brexit is daunting enough, but, within the realm of what was manageable, did the May government marshal its counsellors as effectively as it could have done? Cameron’s European advisers had deliberately ...”

“... boring Arsenal. Even when they won, they were losers.In 1989, while coaching Monaco, Wenger met David Dein, the Arsenal vice chairman. Wenger went to an Arsenal match and after the game shared a cigarette with a friend of Barbara Dein, David’s wife. He was invited to their house in Totteridge, North London, for supper ...”

“... and ‘every single postwar prime minister, from Clement Attlee (whom I met at the theatre) to David Cameron’, as well as other ‘formidable and extraordinarily interesting people, despite being rather dull myself’. She was born, as Jean Campbell-Harris, in 1922 to aristocratic parents who sent her to a series of ...”

“... their way to a Royal Marine assault course. Next appears Robin Cook, who is led aside by Alastair Campbell and rehearsed in conspiratorial whispers about what he is to say to the reptiles waiting across the road. Cook, whom I’ve never met, gives me a quick, suspicious look. Alastair, whom I have, carefully ignores me. The Supremo of Spin moves over to the ...”