“... the Black Prince winning his spurs and, by the end of the year, both John II of France and David II of Scotland safely locked up in the Tower of London awaiting ransom. Mission accomplished. Except it wasn’t. Sumption takes us on through the chevauchées – the large-scale mounted raids that the English used to weaken and demoralise the French in ...”

“... interesting.’Ono also produced a catalogue for her imaginary exhibition, The Museum of Modern (F)Art. It opens with a photomontage of her standing next to an oversized jar in the MoMA sculpture garden. Photographs of corridors, galleries and street scenes are overlaid with arrows pointing to invisible flies. The catalogue and an accompanying short film are ...”

“... embody ‘MAGA: The Next Generation’. JD Vance, formerly known as James Donald Bowman, James David Hamel and J.D. Vance, now strangely rebranded without the stops, is a self-styled ‘hillbilly’ whose backwoods was Middletown, Ohio, an industrial suburb of Cincinnati (pop. 50,987), where he went from poverty to Yale Law School. He wrote a bestselling ...”

“... into that of causality is not, as Russell once said it was, a purely arbitrary stipulation. David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, which is usually judged to be his principal contribution to philosophy, though he himself preferred his later and more polished Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, was first ...”

“... acknowledges, on research done for other projected and equally unauthorised lives of Hammett by David Fechheimer and William Godschalk, and upon material gathered by William Nolan, editor of Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook. In other words, Shadow Man emerges from a background of intrigue: prolonged scuffling in the literary undergrowth and a growing sense of ...”

“... its dust-jacket) there is a good colour illustration of a self-portrait and still-life painted by David Bailly of Leiden in 1651. A young artist (is it too ingenious to suggest that it represents Bailly himself as a young man?) holds Bailly’s portrait on a table where a wide variety of other works of art appear together with a candle, a skull, an hourglass ...”

“... Adolf Hitler: The Medical Diaries consists of a translation of the medical records kept by Hitler’s physician, Dr Theodor Morell, and of Mr Irving’s extensive commentaries on those records. Morell, a fashionable Berlin GP specialising in venereal diseases, became the Führer’s personal doctor at Christmas 1936. The elevation, which took place during a visit to Hitler’s retreat on the Obersalzberg, was greeted by Morell’s wife with the oracular words: ‘What do we need with that!’ – a rendering, presumably, of ‘Wozu brauchen wir das?’ The diaries begin in July 1941, a few weeks after the start of the Russian campaign ...”

“... Undoubtedly, without domestication – ‘the greatest conservation movement of all time’, as David Harris has happily put it – sheep might have disappeared from the Old World. Furthermore, the link between dog and man has not been without significance for sheep. The sheep dog has its own special place in Ryder’s study. For Keneally’s ...”

“... long and slow’, ‘the rain, immanent as stars,/now falling, falling slowly’. ‘In Memoriam David Jones’ has the title of an elegy but is entirely a poem about landscape. Jones probably made as much use of landscape as any poet has ever done, but Robertson’s poem has nothing of Jones’s High Modernist style. Its six-line stanzas are composed of a ...”

“... need not produce notes at all. He first provided endnotes, not footnotes, and it was a letter from David Hume that urged him to put source references on the page. Gibbon took this advice, but put the satirical notes on the page also, with great benefit to the reader, for now the joke was not so widely separated from its occasion. In another of his ...”

“... Are we all bare-faced liars?’ The question came from Jonathan Aitken, Minister of State for Defence Procurement, in January 1994. It was put to the then editor of the Guardian, Peter Preston. The words ‘we all’ referred to Aitken himself, his wife Lolicia and his faithful Arab friend Said Ayas. The answer to the question was ‘yes’. They were all bare-faced liars, but none more so than the debonair minister himself ...”

“... cross old Peggotty’s arm – and she died like a child that had gone to sleep!’ Clara’s son David, his retrospective narrative voice moving between the worlds of service and gentility, speaks for Dickens in musing on the socially ambitious Em’ly: ‘I have asked myself the question, would it have been better for little Em’ly to have had the waters ...”

“... and dispassionate answer, we now have the Nuffield volume on last year’s election.† in which David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh recount the ebb and flow of battle in that relentlessly detailed and studiously prosaic style which has characterised the Nuffield studies from the beginning; and there is precious little comfort in it for Neil Kinnock, even ...”

“... the result from a sample poll?’ Any return to Labour’s golden past seems as unlikely as Dr David Owen’s reappearance on its benches as a prodigal son, but Silkin’s message still has some validity for a party reeling from a third successive defeat. The truth is, he writes, credit companies tend to treat their members with more respect than Labour ...”

“... stories in this book recognise it in one way or another. Most, like the examples by Helen Garner, David Brooks, Peter Carey, Joan London, Kate Grenville, are admirably achieved on this basis, the authors all born in the Forties or Fifties; and the names indicate that the newer European immigrants have not yet found a voice in their new language. Particularly ...”