“... convey the broad picture, it cannot offer the sense and quality of experience. An example comes in David Feldman’s elegant chapter on migration. By defining this simply as the crossing of boundaries, he is able to embrace almost a majority of the urban population and juxtapose the longer-distance Victorian economic influx into cities with the 20th-century ...”

“... of Victorian Gothic larded with Islamic motifs, resoundingly to flight.’ Architecture, as David Cannadine has pointed out, played a part in the consolidation of the Indian Empire, and the Viceroy’s House, ‘a ducal domain-cum-country house-cum-princely palace’, complete with six thousand servants, was a metaphor for the social hierarchy and ...”

“... has advocated ‘home rule all round’ in a new federal union. A similar call has come from David Melding, the Conservative deputy presiding officer of the Welsh Assembly, in The Reformed Union: The UK as a Federation, published last year; while Conservatives at Westminster, including Kenneth Baker, Malcolm Rifkind and members of the so-called Democracy ...”

“... Baker somewhere on a line of descent between Donald Barthelme, with whom he briefly studied, and David Foster Wallace. Yet Howie isn’t void-struck or an object of satire. Like Mike, the narrator of Baker’s second novel, Room Temperature (1990), he just wants to get things ‘correctly situated in the felt periphery of life’. ‘What oft was ...”

“... Reading this Life of Lloyd George is like watching one of those old James Cagney movies where it’s established early on that the protagonist isn’t simply an anti-hero but, for all that he’s lionised, an irredeemable villain. The fun comes from watching him get away with all sorts of caddishness early on and then carry on the virtuoso act long after everyone has got his number ...”

“... Craig has been signed up for the American remake of the first film, which will be directed by David Fincher. The quest to find Lisbeth Salander took on Scarlett O’Hara proportions; the role has been filled with attendant fanfare by Rooney Mara, who was introduced to the world in Fincher’s last movie, The Social Network. (It will be interesting to see ...”

“... offstage, and a chorus (of local women) speaking blindly of freedom for the ‘seed of Atreus’. David Kovacs, another recent translator of Euripides’ Orestes, tells us the play was ‘immensely popular in antiquity’, but this fact only increases his puzzlement, which he shares with Carson. ‘This most baffling play,’ Kovacs says, ‘has a plot that ...”

“... who gained international notoriety, mostly through celebrated trials: Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Ericka Huggins, Elaine Brown. But rather than focusing on the sensationalist and salacious aspects of the party’s history – the confrontations, violence, criminality – Bloom and Martin choose to recount ...”

“... On the German side, the history of the last two years of the Second World War is a history of retreating. Occasionally, the retreats were punctuated by large-scale counter-attacks – Rommel at the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia; Operation Autumn Mist in December 1944 – but whether they liked it or not, the German forces generally had to move backwards ...”

“... just had a baby. The baby is called Harper, not after Harper Lee, but after the only daughter of David and Victoria ...”

“... and early 21st centuries, agnostic clerics such as John Robinson, the author of Honest to God, David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies of the Enlightenment on the Christian ...”

“... Warburg had a remarkable ability to charm his business guests. In the words of his successor, David Scholey, he was an ‘old actor-manager’ who could turn on a performance as required. He understood that human contact was at the centre of investment banking and took delight in the psychological intricacy of the process. Ferguson provides a fascinating ...”

“... If so, it will serve Labour right if it wins the next election and has to live with it. Meanwhile, David Willetts, the shadow minister for universities and skills, has said that the Conservatives will delay the REF ‘by up to two years to establish whether a sound and widely accepted measure of impact exists’. It is no accident that since 1979 there have ...”

“... of high status all over the world look out from magnificent portraits, defying all encumbrances. David Cannadine’s study Ornamentalism wittily captures the ways the governors and viceroys of the British Empire vied with Indian rajahs and African kings in their spectacular apparel, all of them arrayed in plumes, festoons and baubles. Something about ...”

“... read what he writes and not think of similarities between then and now. His book is in contrast to David Kynaston’s four-volume history of the City of London, which takes up the idea of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ and portrays the Victorian era as a relatively sane and sober interlude.* Kynaston explains the hands-off policy in terms of esprit de corps. The ...”