“... London Evening Standard had turned down the editorship of the Times in favour of succeeding Sir David English at the Daily Mail. As a boy, wrote Sir Perry, he had wanted to be editor of the Times more than anything in the world. So when Mr Paul Dacre picked Rothermere’s Daily Mail in preference to Rupert Murdoch’s Times, Worsthorne’s first reaction ...”

“... The parchment or papyrus scroll, a millennium before the invention of the codex, was by no means an object, like a book, that had clear boundaries. The professional scribes, in all likelihood working in the temple precincts, who were charged with the maintenance of the scrolls exercised considerable licence, one may infer, in expanding or modifying ...”

“... and transferred the setting to Scotland. Later still he moved the scene to London and by this time David’ – of whom more later – ‘had joined the list of characters. Although the book was fiction, he drew Fiddes in the likeness of David. This book, Some Gorgeous Accident, was eventually published in 1967. Link in the ...”

“... idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state. I make no apology for repeating it. It means the end of a thousand years of history.’ It sounds like the mystical patriot Powell. It was in fact the eminently sensible Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell.Even so, it is Powell who best embodies the dynamics at work in this era of switchback politics. He ...”

“... no different from their Nationalist counterparts in that both were prepared to use constitutional means so long as these worked, and force if they did not. The events of August 1914 led to the postponement both of Home Rule for Ireland and of any showdown between the British Government and the Ulster Unionists, but by the end of the war the popular mood in ...”

“... officials. He also dangled the prospect of a direct meeting with Putin. This was dressed up as a means of achieving a ‘game-changing effect … in bringing the end of the new Cold War’. Over the next few months, Page started supplying the campaign with talking points about Russia policy and helped provide an outline for an energy policy speech Trump gave ...”

“... it is right that this new prime minister takes the decision about when to trigger Article 50,’ David Cameron said in his resignation speech. Few doubted that the prime minister could send the notification – the question was when it would be sent – but the claimants in Miller challenged this assumption. Treaties are agreements between states. But states ...”

“... David Womersley’s massive and elegant edition of Gibbon is the better timed because it comes a century after the edition scholars have been obliged to use as the nearest to a critical text. It was in 1896 that J.B. Bury brought out the first volume of his edition, which he reissued in 1909 and which until now has been considered standard ...”

“... regimental service in Ireland and India was dominated by his love of sports and hunting, but Sir David Fraser rightly demolishes the conventional assumption that such interests are incompatible with professional zeal. In fact, Alan Brooke took soldiering extremely seriously, especially the acquisition of languages and every aspect of gunnery. He married on ...”

“... the novel power of social media to drum up interest and financial support. His campaign manager David Plouffe liked to say of Obama’s candidacy: ‘Walking a tightrope without a net … That’s when we are at our best.’ Yet when Obama does make a misstep – and inevitably there are plenty, from dismissing Clinton as ‘likeable enough’, to ...”

“... steps like effigies to some exhausted god of creation.’ Into this quiet world rides a knight. David Knight is a handsome lieutenant with hair in ‘Cellinian frescoes and fashionable porticoes over his dented brow’. He carves their names into a tree. ‘David, ...”

“... west. Bailyn’s Peopling lays great emphasis on the mechanisms of long-distance land grab, the means by which men with political clout were able to get big chunks of estate in profitable valleys or by useful waterways, and then tempt out the settlers whose work would make these valuable. He sees that, with a fluid frontier, tenancy agreements were unlikely ...”

“... and dominated popular understanding of the nations’s common past for more than half a century. David Cannadine’s characteristically spirited and combative study is more than just an intellectual biography: it is a work of piety, advocacy and passion. He uses the corpus of Trevelyan’s historical writings over fifty years – Wycliffe, Garibaldi, the ...”

“... notion that in the kitchen there is nothing new and nor can there be anything new’. What this means is that recipes nicked from an admirably diverse cast of victims are interspersed with discussions of some of history’s ‘higher cribbers’: Borges, Montaigne, Stevenson, Eliot, Mann and Harold Bloom; Michel Tournier and Alain Robbe-Grillet; pretend ...”

“... things​ in the relations between authors and publishers never change. Dear Mr Murray, edited by David McClay (John Murray, £16.99), a collection of letters written to six generations of the Murray family, is full of familiar complaints. Jane Austen was ‘very much disappointed … by the delays of the printers’. Maria Rundell, author of A New System of ...”