“... we know that in 2012 the political fallout was only just beginning. It was in December 2011 that David Cameron reopened the European question by opting out of the new ‘fiscal compact’ drawn up by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy with the aim of enforcing budget discipline across the EU. In the US in spring 2012, Mitt Romney emerged as the candidate from ...”

“... 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 catered for customers from the middle and ...”

“... known as Amal (both an acronym that stands for Detachments of Lebanese Resistance and a noun that means ‘hope’). Another was the rapid ascendancy of two Shia religious leaders, who, like al-Sadr, studied in the holy Shia city of Najaf in Iraq: Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah and Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah. The decisive factor in the shift from Hope ...”

“... at a million pounds apiece, will be painted European green and dispersed to other barracks. David Cameron announced in December 2013 that the troops could come home because their mission had been accomplished. ‘The prime minister’s declaration of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack ...”

“... absence has required older ships to continue sailing long beyond their life expectancy, which means that they are often tucked away in dry docks under repair. Tourism and island industries of all kinds have suffered. Not for the first time, island people accuse the ferries of ruining the local economy and despise MacBrayne’s as a tyrannical ...”

“... his 35 years at Netherne. This led me, some months later, to an office in Lambeth belonging to David O’Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals, and chair of the Adamson Collection Trust. We walked up and down the corridors of the clinic where he worked and looked at the display of patients’ pictures on the walls (these ...”

“... in Axler’s proposed salvation-by-child, or by love or sex (‘He who forms a tie is lost’ – David Kepesh’s friend George O’Hearn, telling it straight in The Dying Animal). They won’t save him, and nor will solitude: it’s the absence of ties which has brought him to this pass. Axler has no family: no memories of dear Morty Sabbath to stay his ...”

“... in fact New Labour avant la lettre. Mullin is well aware that taking the paymaster’s shilling means forsaking his independence. As a parliamentary life form, junior ministers are even more amoebic than backbench MPs, who can at least hope to leave their mark by sponsoring a private member’s bill, select committee membership, tenacious single-issue ...”

“... the opening sentence by heart: ‘Du plus loin que je me souvienne, j’ai entendu la mer.’ It means: ‘As far back as I can remember I have heard the sound of the sea.’ The American translation confuses the verb écouter (‘to listen to’) with entendre (‘to hear’). This is not a good beginning. All my plans have been turned upside down. It will ...”

“... valley’s first major firm, Hewlett-Packard, was a military contractor. One of its co-founders, David Packard, was an undersecretary of defence in the Nixon administration; his signal contribution as a civil servant was a paper about overriding the laws preventing the imposition of martial law. Many defence contractors have flourished in Silicon Valley in ...”

“... of how the adaptation (or ‘co-adaptation’, as Darwin sometimes referred to it) of organic means to ends came about. Earlier natural theologians – including William Paley, whom Darwin read closely – had argued instead for the creationist view that only an intervening intelligence could explain the fittedness of eyes, wings and so on to their ...”

“... many modern historians recognise. In The Long Shadow, his recent study of the legacy of 1914-18, David Reynolds makes the important point that the bulk of contemporary poetry, far from being anti-war, was fiercely patriotic and positive in tone. It is often forgotten that Wilfred Owen went to his grave in 1918 still resolute that the allied cause was ...”

“... Germany’s many-sided nature as well as the diversity of its cultural achievements. This means not only demonstrating that German history didn’t begin in 1933 and end in 1945 but, more important, inviting the visitor to escape from the teleological vision that sees everything in the German past as leading up to Hitler and everything in its memory ...”

“... He’s invariably linked with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least ...”

“... he didn’t credit the men and women he met in the East End – ‘a subservient lot’, he told David Marquand years later – with his conversion to socialism. That may have already been underway but would be shaped by his work teaching in the industrial north.His quarrel with Oxford in a sense drove him there. In 1905, Tawney joined the newly formed ...”