“... is demonstrated and evil is overcome.’ The German oak came to stand for such victories. Caspar David Friedrich’s The Solitary Tree (1822) shows a battered oak in the foreground, damaged by the storms of the French invasion and the Napoleonic Wars but still in full leaf on its lower branches, providing shelter for a shepherd and his flock. Its loneliness ...”

“... in the 15 years she’s been writing novels. Her first, The Cast Iron Shore (1996), won the David Higham Prize for Fiction; her second, When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), won the Orange Prize over the shoo-in, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth; her third, Still Here (2002), was longlisted for the Booker Prize; her fourth, The Clothes on Their Backs ...”

“... Forest, as there is in Rick Blaine’s self-pitying drunk scene in Casablanca. ‘Proof,’ says David Thomson of the latter in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, ‘of how far Bogart needed a great artist to help him rise above the level of maudlin resentment.’ Thomson suggests that self-regard prevented him from acting beyond the obvious. He is at his ...”

“... supporting British liberty and strength. Now English people who notice it wonder what it was for. David Cameron says he will fight to prevent the break-up of Britain ‘with every single fibre’. But why? When Salmond rang him up after the election and read out a shopping list of demands, Cameron seems to have been oddly silent. Many London commentators made ...”

“... to save them from starving.’ But the story did not end there. When in 2002 the home secretary, David Blunkett, slipped into a bill a provision expressly empowering such action, the Human Rights Act required him to include a safety-net provision that the use of the power was not to result in inhuman or degrading treatment of the destitute. Mr Justice ...”

“... he didn’t credit the men and women he met in the East End – ‘a subservient lot’, he told David Marquand years later – with his conversion to socialism. That may have already been underway but would be shaped by his work teaching in the industrial north.His quarrel with Oxford in a sense drove him there. In 1905, Tawney joined the newly formed ...”

“... in Assad’s inner circle feared that Syria would be next). According to Assad’s biographer David Lesch, ‘Damascus wanted the Bush doctrine to fail, and it hoped that Iraq would be the first and last time it was applied. Anything it could do to ensure this outcome, short of incurring the direct military wrath of the United States, was considered fair ...”

“... valley’s first major firm, Hewlett-Packard, was a military contractor. One of its co-founders, David Packard, was an undersecretary of defence in the Nixon administration; his signal contribution as a civil servant was a paper about overriding the laws preventing the imposition of martial law. Many defence contractors have flourished in Silicon Valley in ...”

“... deployment of US forces would play into Baghdadi and Zawahiri’s hands. Towards the end of June, David Cameron told the House of Commons that Isis could take control of northern Iraq and set up a government there: ‘The people in that regime, as well as trying to take territory, are also planning to attack us here at home in the United Kingdom.’ It’s a ...”

“... by sex, and ended up living with Jardine in a companionable relationship best described – by David Lodge – as a ‘Boston marriage’.) Another effect of her conversion was to bolster the formal daring she’d shown in her first short stories. Broadly speaking, her novels are eager to puncture the conventions of realist fiction, though careful to throw ...”

“... just like Dr Richard Kimble, the honourable, though much more reluctantly engaged fugitive. David Janssen The series ran to 120 episodes, and was on US television from 1963 to 1967. The finale had the highest ratings of any TV show until the answer to the question of who shot JR was revealed (can anyone now remember?). In 1993 The Fugitive was made ...”

“... and Ethiopia’ that was published in the collection A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman (edited by David Reynolds), and they also feature in Folsom’s excellent introduction to this facsimile edition of the first book publication of Democratic Vistas. Spurred into prose by Carlyle’s taunts and barbs, Whitman set himself the task of composing three essays ...”

“... sick and tired of? How do you remain the party of business and a party of the majority when, as David Rockefeller complained, ‘people are blaming business and the enterprise system for all the problems of our society’? How to finesse the passage of regulatory legislation in the areas of occupational health and safety, the environment and consumer ...”

“... more mysterious. They have been the subject of two previous books, by Mollie Gillen (1972) and David Hanrahan (2008), both called The Assassination of the Prime Minister. Linklater doesn’t add much information or evidence about the event itself, but he puts it in context, and provides fascinating if overblown speculations about the supposed ...”

“... By the end it was clear that Gordon was safe, but it was a close-run thing. If Alan Johnson or David Miliband had jumped ship, the game would have been well and truly up. The hope is that we can make it to the summer recess without any more calamities. After that, who ...”