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“... and Vermeer – I started to stumble. It may seem notable that, say, Samuel Johnson and David Garrick set off together to conquer London from Lichfield, or that Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne were once classmates in Aix, but it’s not clear that such coincidences demand joint biographies, let alone overarching hypotheses.Snyder is proper in her ...”

“... Turks or Persians, they were in each case under the boot of a central regime prepared to use any means necessary to stifle the merest hint of autonomous sentiment. Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria – despite their abiding differences in other areas – would at times band together to hold down the Kurds, sharing intelligence and co-ordinating security ...”

“... such as the Webbs. Tawney opposed the Webbs’ proposals for a national minimum wage. ‘It means that people are not paid what they are worth,’ he argued, ‘but what is necessary to keep them working.’ Tawney rose to public prominence in 1919 when he defended the rights of miners at the Royal Commission on the Coal Industry. His ...”

“... dramatised, his master’s compositions. Rembrandt later returned to the subject, at least twice. David de Witt suggests in his catalogue essay that it wasn’t the subject, an exotic conversion story long interpreted in terms of the whitening of the soul by Christian baptism, that encouraged this flurry of painted renditions, so much as the pretext it gave ...”

“... required that the actual source of motive power be obscured. Fressoz acknowledges his debt to David Edgerton, who argued in The Shock of the Old (2006) that we do not understand modernity because of our fixation on innovation and our lack of interest in the way systems of production operate. Accounts of contemporary reality organised around technological ...”

“... of such a state on managerial-centralist lines, which he hadn’t foreseen or intended as the means to conquer the ‘five giants’ described in his report: ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness’.During 1942 Churchill’s position sometimes seemed precarious, as two years of relentless defeat culminated in the fall of Singapore in February ...”

“... inquiry into serious crimes for a political reason. There had to be a plot, to remove him by other means. And Chief Constable Colin Sampson drew the short straw as metteur-en-scène. So John Stalker is in the wilderness. Suddenly the Police Force he has been running in Manchester has run him out of town; and as he mows the lawn at home he has time to reflect ...”

“... Oxford Books have been anything from six hundred pages to a thousand; Davie’s predecessor David Cecil’s Christian Verse was six hundred, while Davie runs to not more than half that. Where Cecil’s 1940 volume gave 40 pages to Browning and 14 to Coventry Patmore, in Davie both poets have sunk without trace. But such disappearances are only ...”

“... us – but he has made it his stock-in-trade. It does not make for intimacy of collaboration, as David Owen recognised in coining the soubriquet ‘le Roi lean Quinze’. The point about the grand manner is that it only really comes off in context, when the level of events rises to match it. They laughed at Macmillan, until he became prime minister, and at ...”

“... first dawning sense of the historicity of society so rudely awakened by the French Revolution. David Wittenberg does much better than this, but his remarkable hypothesis is only one of the conceptual breakthroughs in this stimulating contribution to literary theory. I will dwell mainly on the three that interest me the most: the relationship of SF to ...”

“... study of the Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost, and Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated. David Van Reybrouck’s enormous history is the latest addition to this literature. Van Reybrouck is a Dutch-speaking Belgian journalist whose father was working as an electrical engineer in Katanga at the time of Moïse Tshombe’s secessionist uprising in ...”

“... Slessor’s good works on the Upper Niger still earn her an image on Scottish banknotes, while David Livingstone became the world’s best-known Scotsman. They did not save many souls. After 50 years’ work in India, the missions could show only 3359 converts. But their influence on empire was deep and paradoxical, at once the advance guard of colonialism ...”

“... The Western Canon, as though its author – and its editor, since the book has been assembled by David Mikics from pieces written over the past half-century – was provoked by the reaction to his earlier book into seeing a wider world of writing. There are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert ...”

“... of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In Mysore, Darwin Day was observed by an exhibition ‘proclaiming the importance of the day and the greatness of the scientist’. In Charlotte, North Carolina, there ...”

“... labour markets, as the failsafe recipe for stability and growth; all see political union as a means by which to apply this policy; nearly all gesture towards the European Parliament as the mechanism for lending it ‘legitimation’. Where the proposals differ is in the respective weight they give to intergovernmental bodies as opposed to supranational ...”