“... uniformly laudatory. This was not easy in the face of critics as formidable as Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Basil Liddell Hart, and by the beginning of World War Two the attempts to defend him were looking increasingly threadbare. The publication of Haig’s Diaries after the war (unkindly described by Lord Beaverbrook as committing suicide after ...”

“... two won’t let the other play any more. Glover is the boy who was left out in the cold, which may be felt to colour his version of events. If he’d chosen to reveal in 1989 what he chooses to reveal now about himself and his co-founders Matthew Symonds and Andreas Whittam-Smith he might have found recruits hard to come by. Comparing his book with my own ...”

“... up a rose garden, a white blanket of ice blossoms formed from salt and frozen drops of water. They may last for four hours or two days. Such lyrical yet precise descriptions are characteristic of Høeg’s half-Western, half-Inuit protagonist. To paraphrase Wallace Stevens, Smilla has a mind of winter: or, as it states in her Danish police report, ‘anybody ...”

“... on by the medical profession, set out to curb the tobacco industry. They were Kenneth Robinson and David Owen (Labour) and Sir George Young (Tory). All three were routed. The hardest fighter of the three was Sir George Young. His determination to cut down, for instance, on tobacco’s sponsorship of sports made him unpopular in those parts of the Tory Party ...”

“... I would say it is inevitable that something is going to snap. Quite what it will be – and it may not have escaped notice that the two scenarios I have not dismissed are two and five – I cannot judge. And it is perhaps unfair to look to Messrs Butler and Kavanagh for clairvoyance. Their book claims to be nothing other than the picture of a political ...”

“... home and sit under the staircase. And his conclusion is consistent with that scathingly drawn by David Owen: ‘the Royal Family, central government and local government politicians, the admirals, generals and air marshals and senior administrators all survive. But millions of others lose their lives. Money is to be spent on Sub-Regional Headquarters; the ...”

“... with accounts of visits to Adolf Grünbaum in Pittsburgh, to Richard Swinburne in Oxford, to David Deutsch in Headington, to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a way of evoking possibilities as much as seeking ...”

“... full of bankers. 6. They put prices up during the festival. 7. They think they’re great. You may be glad to learn that Crawford’s book is a little more discursive, open-minded and generally responsive to the idea that there might be great things to be said about both cities, but for some reason my eye kept digging out the more deadly quotes. In ...”

“... in his lifetime – new discoveries or dramatic revisions to previous orthodoxies. He may have been the first to place the pre-Socratics, whose work was just being edited, in a history of philosophy that also included Darwin and Hegel. He combined the latest discoveries of ‘scientific’ archaeology with Winckelmann’s repertoire of celebrated ...”

“... one of several umbrellas, is adjusting the noose. Powell’s co-conspirators, George Atzerodt and David Herold, still have their heads free: their expressions – private reckoning, a kind of baffled fear – are legible on their faces. A large man in a white coat and Panama hat is fussing round them, carrying with him the incongruous atmosphere of a summer ...”

“... that successive Tory leaders have stuck to it. The 0.7 per cent figure was reached in 2013, on David Cameron’s watch, an achievement regarded with pride. Theresa May, on the eve of her departure from Downing Street, went out of her way to reaffirm the commitment. Even Boris Johnson is standing by it – for now. The ...”

“... lecturer, who, along with a significant number of radicals, later fell in with the Russophobe, David Urquhart, and like most of Urquhart’s followers, became a devotee of the Turkish bath. (The mania for hydropathy or water-cures is a little-known coda to Chartism, and worthy of further study.) Included, too, is Joseph Barker, another Methodist ...”

“... John Donne, and was seized upon by a readership anxious to stress the degeneracy of their own age. David Jones, an autochthonous Welsh, rather than Anglo-American, modernist of Poundian tendencies, offers another poet’s version of Johnson’s aperçu in his preface to the Anathemata (1952), and claims the Metaphysicals for Wales at the same time. Jones is ...”

“... urban counter-terrorist force does not make edifying reading. In 1941, a subaltern in the Guards, David Stirling, fighting Rommel in the Western Desert, decided that what the campaign needed was guerrilla tactics: small units of highly-trained commandos striking by stealth. After the war, the skills of the first Special Air Service were transferred to the ...”

“... alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental art, especially Cézanne, but they were able to develop their own work with an originality that weaker ...”