“... 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 ...”

“... turned it into an unrivalled instrument of British policy and won their lasting adoration (which David Owen sourly put down to ‘inverted snobbery’). As minister of labour between 1940 and 1945, Bevin achieved with remarkably little agony the greatest mobilisation and demobilisation in British history. Churchill deserves every credit for seeing that this ...”

“... in the late 1960s, are no longer central to his achievement. Cutting It Short isn’t the David Lodge novel that its English title seems to promise; indeed, one of the things that is to be docked – twice, and excruciatingly – by the heroine, who happens to be Hrabal’s mother, Marie, is the tail of a dog. This was the 1920s, and suddenly ...”

“... England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ...”

“... wonders why ordinary men and women generally obey their rulers. It was a problem that perplexed David Hume as well. ‘Nothing is more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye,’ Hume wrote in 1758, ‘than to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few ... When we enquire by what means this wonder is brought ...”

“... was done even now. Oliver Tambo corresponded from London. Someone from England – maybe it was David Astor, he was a friend – sent him the Observer. And he had lots of American friends, especially Martin Luther King. It was a terrible thing for us when Martin was killed. Father had a whole collection of Martin’s speeches on tape and he used to play ...”

“... motifs are intertwined with contemporary academic and sexual politics, clearly owes a good deal to David Lodge; the theme of the lost literary legacy invokes The Aspern Papers; James might be cited again in relation to the book’s punning deployment of ‘possession’ as a term of material, erotic and demonic significance, an association that also reminds ...”

“... that dispose one somewhat more against Tennant. Philip Hoare relates one, as told by the Hon. David Herbert, about his treatment of the actress Margaret Rutherford. He cultivated her assiduously – even, more or less, proposing marriage to her – and she fell for his charms, and then when one day she came to his house for the weekend, he quite shattered ...”

“... wanted tends to get lost in a professional ‘linguistic ambiguity’, to borrow a phrase used by David Ottaway in the Washington Post. Crocker writes that he wished to prepare for peace. The effect of what he did was to guarantee war. Large parts of Angola were ravaged in the period following Crocker’s success in making peace. Here was a dominant ...”

“... can now be revealed in its true colours, as a rerun of the biblical story in which Goliath gives David a well-deserved beating. In both Gilbert and The Invisible Man Coren confronts the question of anti-semitism, and once again there is an instructive contrast. Chesterton and Belloc were notorious anti-semites, while Wells has only rarely been put in this ...”

“... military presence in Nato; John Young’s reassessment of British attitudes to European union; David Reynolds on the sharply different views of the post-1945 strategic pattern held by Attlee and Bevin, and the clash of the British chiefs of staff (already looking on Russia as the new enemy) first with the Foreign Office (which initially wanted to appease ...”

“... and instantly recognisable’ African rhythm) to the ‘folk-songs’ of the British Isles like ‘David of the White Rock’, ‘Loch Lomond’ and ‘Oh, No, John, No!’ All represented the ‘music of basic realities, the spontaneous expression by the people for the people of elemental emotions’. Robeson’s early preference of spirituals to ...”

“... section of Tenured Radicals to the de Man affair, as an academic cover-up of Watergate dimensions. David Lehman’s Signs of the Times – reviewed here not long ago by Claude Rawson – is a narrative and meditation on the same subject. The tone is less enjoyably sarcastic than Kimball’s, but Lehman too is convinced that the de Man case is symptomatic of a ...”