“... than a nibble round the edge, crop eradication has to be a full-scale military undertaking. When David Mellor, the Home Office minister responsible for drug control, visited South America last year, he made much of fighting the drug industry ‘at source’, promising British aid to the tune of £1.5 millon. Measured against the money generated by the ...”

“... that ‘he would go to the stake for his opinions but would go courteously raising his hat’; David Garnett found him ‘rather rigid with good intentions’; others said that he never saw a joke and could not bear to lose at croquet. The generous impulses were certainly there, but tended to take predictable forms: faced with suffering, he reached for his ...”

“... form of ‘inquisition’) as a proof of the religion’s authenticity. Under the leadership of David Miscavige, Hubbard’s successor, the church has responded aggressively to the online publication of confidential materials, treating hackers as a new enemy, as threatening as psychiatry. It reframes attacks on Scientology’s sealed materials as an assault ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Cathedral burst spontaneously into flame. Any biography of Catherine has to stand comparison with David Starkey’s brilliant full-length portrait in Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. Starkey has an unrivalled grasp of the intricacies of Tudor court politics, and his portrait of Catherine offers a richer and surer sense of the wider ramifications of her ...”

“... attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive Englishman posed the already canonised Americans a grave threat. ‘We cannot be all the writers all the time,’ she wrote. ‘We can only be who we are … Writers do not write what they want, they ...”

“... part of Ireland. And he wasn’t the first to see British history in broadly progressive terms; David Hume got there before him in his own History of England (1754-61). If India seemed primitive and decadent to Macaulay, it was because he was predisposed to think it so by his study of English history, his father’s view of his own kind as an ...”

“... for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t need a spatula to enjoy Elizabeth David.) There was an ash tree outside our house in Kentish Town: I know because I had to ask the council to lop away some of the upper growth as it came closer to the bedroom window. (The ancient tree in James’s story is uncomfortably close to the window of the ...”

“... nursing home, while ex-husbands, like the one in ‘Lichen’, show up with younger girlfriends: David in that story has two, one he brings along, and another shown only in a nude snapshot he presents to his ex-wife; it fades in the sun, so that the pubic hair resembles lichen, a metaphor for the pointlessness of male questing after youthful female ...”