“... 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 ...”

“... Hunt does, he does well. But as the writings of History Workshop or the essays on Wales edited by David Smith under the title A People and a Proletariat show, there is more to labour history than is contained in this ...”

“... workers. The only way she can quiet these intrusive thoughts is by singing the first line of David Bowie’s ‘Kooks’ over and over.All Fours, July’s second novel, is about a ‘semi-famous’ interdisciplinary artist whose work is filled with ‘unlikely couplings, unauthorised sex, surrealism and a shit ton of lesbianism’. It would be easy to ...”

“... Like the Jantzen girl advert, it was the ordinary person’s dream of utopia. More recently, David Hockney’s scenes, and Alex Colville’s wonderful flock of schoolgirls diving in to begin a race, give, as it were, the view of the painter. Tennessee Williams, a fanatical swimming pool man, wrote about diving in Sweet Bird of Youth, and contributed a ...”

“... the hegemony of the hueless – the rule of white and grey, the ‘chromophobia’ on which David Batchelor published a lively essay in 2000 – creeps in. The promise of bright colour retreats or gets privatised, and a patch of fierce scarlet here or vibrant viridian there henceforward becomes little more than a trigger for consumer salivation. That ...”

“... landscape painters have chosen subjects close to home. Those who decided to go East – like David Roberts and Edward Lear – tend to be of the second rank. Writers, too, grow strong on a diet of familiar material. Harems of the Mind is mostly an account of talent betrayed by ignorance into shallowness or excess; only a few spirits were strong enough to ...”

“... to 2 p.m. MPs had to come from their constituencies a.m. and get back to evening meetings p.m.! David Stod-dart (Swindon) had the foresight to see that a three-hour debate would keep out most backbenchers, and called a division suggesting it should be a five-hour debate. Defeated! The end-result was two hours and 40 minutes. With four Front Bench speeches ...”

“... zones’ across the territory it seized – territory which the UK’s current foreign secretary, David Lammy, has referred to as having been ‘liberated’. Gary Jones, BP’s regional president for Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, has used similar language, telling an audience at Energy Week 2022 that Karabakh is the ‘perfect opportunity for a fully ...”