“... has come to a head faster than expected as a result of the Scottish independence referendum and David Cameron’s political ambition. Labour has (or had) an electoral interest in keeping Scotland in the Union. The Conservatives do not. Their loyalty to the United Kingdom is sentimental, not electoral. The practical argument against Scottish independence was ...”

“... was spun, and the interplay of developments in London and beyond. In a richly documented vignette David Hayton shows how Irish Tories indulged in Sacheverellism by proxy, championing the cause of their own ‘red-faced, roaring’ militant High Churchman, Francis Higgins. Later they delighted in the fortunes of the Tory lawyer Constantine Phipps, whose ...”

“... A second never knows.’ Supposedly, we only learned how to eat well as a nation when Elizabeth David travelled to the Mediterranean and brought back news of olives, apricots and taramasalata. (Mediterranean Food was published in 1950.) But Meades recalls how his own mother’s cooking changed in the late 1950s, and not necessarily for the better. For the ...”

“... identification. A chapter of Backroom Boys tracks the process by which two Cambridge students, David Braben and Ian Bell, used elegant mathematical fixes to get round the limited memory available on home computers in the early 1980s while writing an epoch-making computer game, Elite: Whether the components are atoms or bits, ideas or steel ...”

“... what amounted to pocket money. (He did better in this respect than the feeble-minded Mr Dick of David Copperfield, who is supplied with pocket money but not allowed to spend it.) Not long after becoming third earl, he fled from home for a brief period in the company of his Swiss valet, though whether this was an abduction or an elopement is hard to say. The ...”

“... prince, has been slipping. The woman modern scholarship gives us has been neatly summed up by David Cannadine: ‘A workaday regnant queen, shorn of her glitter and her gold, her glamour and her greatness, with a false face, a disturbed psyche, a heart of stone, a barren womb and feet of clay; and as such a woman trying to do a man’s job, but not always ...”

“... two of her ‘Japanese’ prints in an episode of the TV show Civilisations, while in a later one David Olusoga brought In the Loge to his argument. A print from 1896 In Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1877-78) a girl of perhaps six or seven half-sits, half-lies, in large armchair. She looks as if she has originally been posed, in a white lacy dress with ...”

“... had been frustrated by de Silva’s inability to compel witnesses to testify about the killing. David Cameron reneged on a government promise to set up an inquiry into Finucane’s murder. Stakeknife, who for 25 years was paid £80,000 a year by the British government, commanded the IRA’s internal security unit, known as the ‘nutting squad’, whose ...”

“... powers – ‘one of the worst and one of the most influential ideas around’, in the opinion of David Starkey in 2019. Hobbes describes it in Leviathan as ‘a doctrine, plainly, and directly against the essence of a Common-wealth … That the sovereign power may be divided. For what is it to divide the Power of a Common-wealth but to Dissolve it? For ...”

“... of Christoph Willibald Gluck, the sculpture of Antonio Canova and the paintings of Jacques-Louis David all aspired to this condition.Museums – and great art – were understood to give pleasure as well as instruction. The Enlightenment was concerned with the pursuit of happiness, not just for oneself but for everyone. The philosophes believed that the main ...”

“... by a mob including, it was said, men in the livery of the secretary of state Henry Bolingbroke. David Edwards, the fugitive printer of the Memorial, was wise to lie low. It would have surprised Edwards to be told, while in hiding, that state censorship was a thing of the past, but for many years that is what historians of the period argued. In 1695 the ...”

“... joined the web, you can’t leave.’In a 2008 interview for the Ballet Association, Scarlett told David Bain that he enjoyed his time at White Lodge ‘perhaps more than he should have’. He didn’t elaborate on what he meant by this. Scarlett won all the school’s choreographic prizes, and it was almost certainly this skill that gained him a place in the ...”

“... treatments of different kinds by Michael Sherborne (2010) and Adam Roberts (2019), plus David Lodge’s fictionalised rendering of Wells’s life in A Man of Parts (2011), while four fully annotated volumes of his letters came out in 1998. Claire Tomalin is one of the most highly acclaimed biographers of our time, with numerous prizes and accolades ...”

“... kind of twinkling naughtiness can occasionally be hard work. (‘Betty Boop in a pas de deux with David Sedaris,’ Dwight Garner called Priestdaddy in the New York Times.) But it’s a mistake to take Lockwood’s cuteness at face value. The rites and symbols she holds up for ridicule – the solemn processions, the incense, the swords, feathers, tufts and ...”

“... This was the case with Colin Powell in the wake of Operation Desert Storm, and with David Petraeus when the Iraq Surge of 2007-08 seemed, briefly, to represent a historic triumph. At other times, imperious civilians keep generals on a short leash, preferring compliance to professional advice. This was the case on both occasions when Donald ...”