“... research, and is indeed hardly less apparent in the work of the supposedly High Tory Jonathan Clark or the proto-Thatcherite Alan Macfarlane as in the Marxist historians whom they attack. There are now a dozen or more learned journals devoted to it – Past and Present, Social History, History Workshop Journal, Llafur, Gender and History to name but a ...”

“... that property was a crime, but sponging and bad landlordship were not. G.M. Trevelyan had a David and Saul relationship of some intensity with his brother Charles, the wenching socialist baronet, who suffered from depression and aristocratic bad temper and wilfulness. If anything could have cured him of progressivism, it would have been the sight of his ...”

“... Forest’ that form the basis for this, her much anticipated last book, in Cambridge in 2003. The Clark Lectures were themselves the product of an extended reflection on the significance of Shakespeare’s imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays. As Peter Holland’s eloquent afterword reminds us, Barton’s ...”

“... debatable. It’s a shocking story, with one of the victims having been battered almost to death. David Cameron is quick to move in and claim the crime is evidence of ‘a broken society’, conveniently ignoring the fact that Edlington, the village in question, is smack in the middle of what was a mining community, a society systematically broken by Mrs ...”

“... which he exercises over their Counsels.’ Olcott made contact with a young Buddhist called Don David Hewavitarane, who took the name Anagarika Dharmapala (‘homeless protector of the Dharma’). Dharmapala’s status in Sri Lanka today is comparable with Gandhi’s in India, but though they were of the same generation, Dharmapala’s anti-Western ideas ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the most appealing a beaker on a dish with a rose belonging to the Saltwood Bequest and so to Alan Clark who is somewhere about, though I don’t see (or hear) him. Then there are lots of terrible flower paintings before some wonderful Goyas in the last room, including a heap of dead fish. The look in the eye of one of the dead bream seems familiar then I ...”

“... reporter and his appalled and belated recognition of the truth. It confirms earlier disclosures by Clark Clifford in his memoirs, and by Seymour Hersh in his biography of Kissinger and – indirectly but in detail – by Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman in his posthumous diaries. In plain words, Richard Nixon’s direct subordinates went to the South ...”

“... group evaluating the full range of options on Vietnam for the incoming Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford. In the capital he learned that McNamara had ordered John McNaughton to organise the writing of an internal historical study of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to the present based on top secret documents. McNaughton assigned the project to his ...”

“... sample by Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, yet even in this respect Hawking’s book has almost certainly outdone any of Penrose’s brilliant, but bristly and bulky popularisations. (A Brief History of Time is 256 pages long and a documentary about Hawking with the ...”

“... previously he had used sable, afterwards hog-hair.’ This change in his work alienated Kenneth Clark, among others: ‘He wrote a card saying that I had deliberately suppressed everything that made my work remarkable, or something like that, and ended: “I admire your courage.” I never saw him again.’ Among Freud’s supporters was Auerbach, whom ...”

“... learned from her mistake. On her arrival at the State Department, she began courting General David Petraeus, the ‘architect of the successful counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq’ according to Allen and Parnes, whom she had offended in 2007 by questioning his rosy assessments of American military prospects. In early 2009, Petraeus was head of ...”

“... other people became stalwarts of a kind, didn’t they? Hugo Williams?Oh, they came in. David Harsent was another.Peter Dale?I think we published some of his poems. He never became quite one of the gang. There was a certain amount of indecision about him then. David Harsent appeared from nowhere. I think via the ...”

“... by Mrs Thatcher but now wholly outmoded.24 October. Judy Egerton sends me Among Booksellers by David Batterham. Batterham is a second-hand bookseller and the book a collection of letters to Howard Hodgkin from the places, some of them quite far-flung, where book-buying has taken him. There are letters from Spain, Finland, provincial France and even ...”

“... Swing Tenor – after his disastrous nervous breakdown in the US Army in the 1940s. According to David Perry in Jazz Greats (1996),Many claims, some of them vague and inflated, have been made about the linguistic originality of black American English, but in the case of Lester Young’s language, such claims seem to have some substance. Buck Clayton believed ...”