“... politics, then? Not exactly. ‘He was his party’s most fertile ideas man at Westminster since David Lloyd George, perhaps since Gladstone,’ Barberis blurts out in his final section, almost as though he has just thought of it, reassuring himself by adding: ‘That is what he was – an ideas man, not a political philosopher or even the careful crafter of ...”

“... before the Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars, they have now made things even with David Daniell’s William Tyndale. Tyndale’s life is soon told. He was born, probably in 1494, of a landowning and entrepreneurial family in that part of Gloucestershire where the Cotswolds meet the Severn, since then the home of Evelyn Waugh (temporarily: the ...”

“... It made me wonder, as I’ll say later, whether we might not have to rethink much of what we’ve held dear about language for thirty-odd years. Why should it matter whether Sign is held to be a language? The consequences for a child of ordinary intelligence, born very deaf, are incalculable. In the past, only the most ...”

“... true, for some are contradictory to others. And they stand in contrast to another group of beliefs held on the whole by the young – concerning the special Scottish contribution to bawdy songs, drunken conviviality, early class consciousness, hardiness and poverty. Items from both sets of belief contribute directly or by opposition to the subject-matter of ...”

“... sidelined because they can’t be trusted to get their sums right, or are they simply being held at arm’s length until it’s safe to let them loose again? Hayek argued that he was only ever trying to preserve democracy: that is, preserve it from its own worst instincts. But in doing so he ended up treating it like one of those precious renewables ...”

“... omertà – I’ll probably be sad about that too.The nub of it is this. Kate Forbes has sincerely held but unpopular views that elevate an ideal of how to live that is antithetical to the liberty of many of her fellow citizens. Some of these views derive from contested interpretations of the Bible that are held by Free ...”

“... to the welfare bill. Given their commitment to protect pensioner benefits, tax credits – despite David Cameron’s earlier promise not to cut them – were pushed to the front of the queue, and in the July budget Osborne announced that tax credits would be cut by £4.4 billion. This amounted to 15 per cent of the total tax credit budget, and meant that more ...”

“... portrays solid reliability in her (yellow?) calf-length coat and peaked cap, her lollipop sign held upside-down at her side. The Bus Conductress and Postman, taken in 1977, might have stepped out of Sander’s taxonomy, People of the 20th Century, were it not for their local insignia. Henri Cartier-Bresson, for the purposes of this exhibition, is cast as a ...”

“... his motives were, he kept them to himself. Arrested at the frontier, he was taken to Vienna and held in the Gestapo headquarters on the Morzinplatz. Deported, at some unknown date between his 25th and 26th birthdays, he became one of the victims of mass-murder. It’s only a matter of time before the Nazis come to get Litzi too, but she manages to leave ...”

“... Kinnock out of the script for good. He is a young man – at 45, four years younger even than David Owen and David Steel; and the electoral college system, with its 40 per cent trade-union weighting, makes him reasonably invulnerable to coups from left or right. As long as he wants to go on leading the Labour Party ...”

“... to growing tabloid contempt until, in 1989, Douglas Hurd set up a Home Office committee under David Calcutt QC to consider measures (including legislative measures) to protect individual privacy against the press. Calcutt was given a year to report, and it was while his committee was at work that David Mellor, then a ...”

“... the same term to the ritual obscenities of bottle-throwing soccer fans somehow seems misplaced. David Riches is aware of this incongruity. His symposium contains 11 papers by 11 different authors drawn from the Proceedings of an ESRC-funded conference held at St Andrews University in January 1985. The violence under ...”

“... right words, I will never know, because he knows what I do not, how to keep things to himself. David Sedaris had invited me to read alongside him that night at UCLA, but before that we had the whole day. We took a cab first to Venice Beach, so that Jason could pay homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘Remember when he says that he feels the pump and it’s ...”

“... is silence, or rather, the rest should be another (and conceivably much more memorable) story. David Hughes’s The Pork Butcher is a worthy winner of the W.H. Smith award, the latest of the series of literary prizes awarded to novels published in 1984. In this, his ninth novel, Hughes has written a moral fable, brief, sensational, and hauntingly ...”

“... young Russian couple – Yulia and Vitaly Stepanov – who helped expose a vast doping conspiracy. David Walsh, a sports journalist for the Times with a good record of uncovering cheats (he wrote about his role in exposing Lance Armstrong in his previous book, Seven Deadly Sins), tells their story with the breathless drive of an airport thriller. The ...”