“... David Hume once remarked that the English had the least national character of any people in the universe. Perhaps this was a cunning Scottish put-down, since character is just what the English pride themselves on. They may not bestride the world in intellect, cuisine or emotional intimacy, but these fancy pursuits can be left to foreigners, and don’t count for much compared to their own moral robustness ...”

“... and has given rise to great unease, even evasiveness, among liberal commentators in Israel. David Shulman’s afterword to this edition is an impressive exception. Khirbet Khizeh is an Arab village, which is captured – more or less without a fight – by a detachment of Israeli soldiers in the 1948 war. (The word khirbah in Arabic, like the Hebrew ...”

“... coaches and managers of the major world soccer teams, and all manner of celebrities, ranging from David Beckham to Charlize Theron. There has been much speculation about whether Diego Maradona will attend the draw. He has been banned from doing so after a recent foul-mouthed TV performance, judged to have brought the game into disrepute, but he is apparently ...”

“... have drawn on their authors’ lives; Jane Eyre, subtitled ‘An Autobiography’, is one example, David Copperfield another. The Brontës tried to conceal their identities behind the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, and the consequences were, first, that their works were scrutinised for evidence of their gender and identity, and, second, that once ...”

“... across in very similar fashion in the other translations I’ve looked at (those of Ann Dunnigan, David Magarshack and Natalie Duddington), offers a fine example of sly and compassionate satire, a very rare genre indeed: In walked a man of indeterminate age and indeterminate physiognomy, at that time of life when it can be difficult to guess a man’s ...”

“... wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining dramatic technique, says: ‘What we’re trying to do is to write ...”

“... been chiming insistently with my reading of Phillip Blond’s Red Tory and my listening to David Cameron’s ‘big society, small government’ speeches. When Cameron speaks of Britain’s ‘atomised’ and ‘broken’ society, and calls for a return to a ‘broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation’, or Blond writes about the ...”

“... Or Jonathan Lethem’s stoned underachievers, with their mad ideas that turn out to be right. David Foster Wallace gave us protagonists who shunned the physical world in favour of the knottier, more intractable challenges of the mind; George Saunders offers comic heroes who fail excellently. Turn the book over, lift up the flap. We don’t look too bad in ...”

“... Company has ‘scarcely a paragraph free of factual errors, unfounded assumptions, or both’. David Daniell’s statistics on Bible printing ‘are both misleading and inaccurate’. A.W. Pollard ‘misunderstood the paragraph almost completely’. Of Lotte Hellinga’s analysis of Robert Redman’s piratical printing practices: ‘Not a word of that is ...”

“... free’ means something like the opposite of what it meant for Gowing. The aim of the co-curators, David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon and Smiles, is to set Turner’s last paintings free from what Brown calls the ‘reductive critical stereotypes’ that have been applied to his work by those who are determined to ignore its historicity, as if its quality and ...”

“... frontiers in the making of nations. If Henry of Northumbria had not predeceased his father, King David I of Scotland, in 1152, Britain might have been divided at the Humber into two more equally sized political units, the kingdom of Greater Scotland (incorporating northern England) and the kingdom of Little England (made up of the midlands and south). Not ...”

“... source came to him with devastating material, and Greenwald checked it out and wrote the stories. David Gregory, the ‘journalist’ who presents Meet the Press, conducted an interview with Greenwald that proved to be a new low, even in the era of supine, on-message political journalism. ‘To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his ...”

“... rowdy teenagers on their estates, the victims of Harold Shipman (whose suicide apparently tempted David Blunkett to ‘open a bottle’). Often, these people are defenceless because they are powerless, and they are powerless because they are poor, less well educated and culturally marginalised. And yet they are still British, and deserving of the state’s ...”

“... were opinion formers like Joseph Addison, who airbrushed out Milton’s regicidal politics, or David Garrick, who turned Shakespeare from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry ...”

“... France, seems plausible. If these figures are accepted, it would make the battle less of a David and Goliath struggle than is popularly assumed. Curry also gives a good account of Agincourt’s after-life in Shakespeare’s Henry V, and in myth, legend, literature and propaganda, and describes the attempts made by the French to explain away the strange ...”