“... more important, the sort embodied by men like Ratko Mladic, leader of the Bosnian Serb forces. David Rohde tells of an occasion when Mladic dropped in on his detainees from Srebrenica. At this time, his troops, aided by irregulars who had crossed into Bosnia from Serbia, were killing the brothers and husbands of the women he had come to lecture. With a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and fiction. Fitzgerald shared with his hero Gatsby an untimely death and barely attended funeral. David Brown’s thorough biography, Paradise Lost, emphasises that Fitzgerald lived with the constant tension between the desire to be a ‘whole man’ and the recognition of its impossibility. His life was full of drama and destruction: reckless spending, high ...”

“... with anger (for the benefit of listeners in Hanoi) about the Vietnam War. Here and at Camp David, Nixon was a terrified witness to Brezhnev’s addiction to speed, as he screeched cars round tight corners and on one occasion bashed the sump out of a new limousine. Knowing his lust for fast cars, the Americans gave him a Cadillac and then a Lincoln ...”

“... controversy by whose lurid light his subsequent work was prejudged and has been judged ever since. David Womersley – now Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford – stands at the head of those scholars who try to situate Gibbon in his 18th-century context, thus raising and trying to answer many questions, of which that just framed is central to the ...”

“... it would appear, among Western countries, to be least true of the United Kingdom.’ The second is David Donnison, in his The Politics of Poverty. It was published in 1982, but the remark I wish to quote is about the year 1978: ‘Labour had lost its convictions about poverty and the redistribution of incomes. Or perhaps the voters at large had lost those ...”

“... similarities between the histories of the two men, two hundred years apart. In his biography, David Macey traces Fanon’s contradictory life from the colonial Caribbean island of Martinique, where he was born in 1925, to France and on through his passionate involvement in the Algerian revolution, to his early death from leukaemia in 1961 at the age of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to mark Pound’s increasingly vituperative attacks on targets ranging from literary London to F.D. Roosevelt (or ‘Franklin D. Frankfurter Jewsfeld’ as he took to calling him), from the Victorian anthologist Palgrave to the ‘kikefied usurers’ – to borrow a phrase from one of his wartime radio broadcasts – he came to blame for both world ...”

“... among them the Nazi-nostalgic François Genoud, Himmler’s masseur Felix Kersten and the young David Irving – to whom he initially gave more trust than they deserved. As Colin Kidd has suggested, Trevor-Roper had a curious weakness for con men. He found them fascinating. But he overestimated his own ability to see through them, and underestimated the ...”

“... it decides to go alone’. A number of influential politicians, including the state’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, believed that going to war was a mistake, particularly without American backing. But Eshkol was a weak leader, viewed with contempt by Israel’s aggressive young generals, and unable to stand his ground against the growing pressure for ...”

“... Party stalwarts in various parts of England where the issue of Europe remains charged. David Cameron’s position as leader seems increasingly questioned by sections of his party who want a speedy referendum on whether the UK should remain within the EU, and many of his backbenchers make little distinction between the Council of Europe (and its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... more rigorous and living languages’. In his last chapter, a fascinating discussion of the art of David Walliker, he makes it plain that meaningful law is impossible because under contemporary conditions of ‘ultra-modernity’ the authority required by such a law cannot exist. Instead we have only ‘the social forms of human absence’ arranged within ...”