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“... World War One; but numbers are used differently now. ‘If you put as much money in as we are,’ David Nash, the retired admiral who heads the rebuilding effort in Iraq, remarked, ‘you can’t help but make a difference.’ Nash, a former top executive with the US construction firm Parsons Brinckerhoff, is in charge of an enormous logistical ballet. On one ...”

“... liberty’. Faced with the verdict that Summerhill was ‘not providing an adequate education’, David Blunkett threatened to shut the school down unless it gave up its philosophy of freedom. After a protracted and costly legal battle, Summerhill held onto its ideological commitment to voluntary lessons – an Independent Schools Tribunal overturned the ...”

“... rusting in the weeds, but a few days later we read that the car that belonged to their leader, David Koresh, has been auctioned for $37,500. No word on who gets those big bucks. In the university town of Austin, Texas we begin to see bumper stickers again. They flaunt their hipness: ‘Keep Austin Weird’ is a motto you see on T-shirts and bags, and ...”

“... to corral. The empire keeps producing idealised images of fixed order, as the fine work of David Quint and Philip Hardie has demonstrated, yet this order is always being disrupted and challenged by the movement of history. Virgil acknowledges at many turns the fact that the imperialist, like the man in the first simile in the Georgics, will be swept ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of which he is a member, is no longer the able and principled Dominic Grieve (who was dismissed by David Cameron to placate his Europhobe backbenchers) but an inexperienced barrister MP, Jeremy Wright. Whatever the reason, the government has chosen, at considerable public expense, to die in a legal ditch and has now ended up legislatively where it could have ...”

“... Change’. These pieces, together with McFarlane’s insightful work from the 1940s, David Morgan’s from the 1990s and a later Catto piece on ‘The Burden and Conscience of Government in the 15th Century’, are his lodestars. The Henry he gives us is largely familiar: deeply religious, just in temperament, firm and busily active in points of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Why should​ poets’ deaths carry more weight than those of others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and expands to commemorate, in laconic sentences and judicious fragments, the deaths (sprinkled with quotes and quirks) of novelists, painters, composers, philosophers ...”

“... echoed by Nigel Farage. But the most significant precursor to the ‘hostile environment’ was David Cameron’s ill-fated pledge of 2010 to reduce net migration (the number entering the UK minus the number leaving) to less than 100,000 a year, at a time when the figure was more than 250,000. New Labour had treated immigration merely as a labour market ...”

“... was behind him. He sent her some photos, which she forwarded to me. He is wearing a Barcelona FC shirt, a pair of shorts over leggings and Crocs: not really appropriate gear for hiking through one of the most inhospitable regions on the American continent.Ngu and his cousin had to borrow money from other Cameroonians to fund the rest of their journey ...”

“... have toyed with this idea when he was opposition leader between 1997 and 2001. But neither he nor David Cameron were brutal and ambitious enough to go for it. No one seems very interested in an English parliament and few people think much of Cameron’s ‘English votes for English laws’ amendments to Commons standing orders. The mass mobilisation of the ...”

“... at the best of times – failed to perceive their good fortune; they still don’t.Although David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had played a central role in negotiating the agreement, many unionists believed they had been conned. While the agreement won the near unanimous endorsement of nationalists in Northern Ireland, it was ...”

“... of narrative, in other words, raises the problem of what, if anything, persists over time. David Hume thought for a while that nothing did; others have proposed the soul, the body, the brain and so on. Whatever the candidate, fictional narratives might help us to see continuity in ways other than the straightforwardly linear. What lends Middlemarch or ...”