“... idle, self-pitying, cruel and unscrupulous. Nor were his brothers much better. Probably, as David Cannadine has written, the lives, loves and morals of George III’s children made them ‘the most unloved royal generation in English history’; though the previous one, the brothers of George III, must have run them pretty close. George behaved like a ...”

“... North London suburb and in New York, bears the impress of American writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, clever, nervy exhibitionists, IQs-with-i-Books, guys who, as Smith has put it, ‘know things’, writers with a gift for speedy cultural analysis, whose prose is choppy with interruption. The Autograph Man may indeed be the nearest that a ...”

“... on peoples accustomed to the autonomy afforded them by Ottoman weakness. ‘It was evident,’ David Fromkin wrote in his fascinating study A Peace to End All Peace (1989), ‘that London either was not aware of, or had given no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces.’ Gertrude Bell was certainly familiar with the population mix of ...”

“... and victim, a virgin forever being interfered with by corrupt and powerful old men, a dewy David battling the thug Goliath. And people, the people apparently, have loved it. They love him being rich, having his own island in the sun, shaming the suits at board meetings, tieless in jumpers knitted by his auntie, getting drunk and randy, blowing millions ...”

“... with its serried ranks so reminiscent of the parade ground, the march past of the modules. As David Batchelor notes in his excellent and generally sympathetic book on Minimalism, ‘in much of this work the traditions of studio craft gave way to something more like small-scale industrial production’ – usually executed, in fact, by someone else ...”

“... like tabloid relish. They include murder (Carr’s ‘honour slaying’ of his ex-scoutmaster, David Kammerer, with Burroughs and Kerouac as accessories); needle-drug addiction (‘quite a sensation’ is Burroughs’s comment on being administered his first shot of morphine by Herbert Huncke); and self-mutilation (Burroughs’s prescient deconstructive ...”

“... It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg and William Roberts – and a revolutionary moment in British art. Even to express support for Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions was daring and radical. Nevinson, having seen a contemporary art show in Venice, knew he was ‘bored with ...”

“... was inventively foul-mouthed, he hated Middle English, and he was quite good at impersonating David Cecil, or Cess-hole (though not so good as Amis, at whose relentless mimicries Larkin usually guffawed). Larkin also drank a lot – beer, mostly – and merciless derision appeared to be his social forte. He was indeed the sort of chap who knew exactly ...”

“... whose brilliant narratives are freer than most of blindness to the Celts. But Henry Hallam, F.W. Maitland and, above all, William Stubbs are presented as the high priests of inveterate Englishism. ‘Despite their immense erudition and their enormous services to the subject, all these scholars positively crowed with nationalistic ...”

“... something that resulted from it. In this Scarisbrick follows contemporary Catholic opinion, and David Starkey has adopted a similar position. Either way, the couple were in for a very long engagement, something almost unknown in the 16th century. It was not until November 1532 that their relationship was consummated, the delays dictated by a most ...”

“... Mosul, Picot was unaware that Kitchener and Sykes were secretly planning to give it to him,’ David Fromkin wrote in A Peace to End All Peace (1989). ‘They wanted the French sphere of influence to be extended from the Mediterranean coast on the west all the way to the east so that it paralleled and adjoined Russian-held zones; the French zone was to ...”

“... Nearly 25 years ago, when Valentino Achak Deng was six years old, his village in Southern Sudan was razed by the murahaleen, paramilitaries working for the government in Khartoum to suppress the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Achak was separated from his family and driven from his home; he was lucky not to have been killed. The people of Marial Bai, like the inhabitants of thousands of other villages across Southern Sudan, were suspected, if not of being rebels themselves, then of providing the rebels with material support ...”

“... to the past to justify social commitments, and a broad slice of the populace tunes in whenever David Starkey or Simon Schama goes on the air to talk about anything from Rembrandt to revolution, Taylor is due some small share of the credit. The populism to which popular history is prone will always make intellectuals nervous, but we would do well to bear in ...”

“... so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment – have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ...”

“... a shortcoming emphasised by Girvin. Exasperated, the US representative in Dublin, David Gray, complained that ‘this running a government on hatred for another country is a very dangerous thing and is bound to land him [de Valera] on the scrap heap eventually.’ He couldn’t have been more wrong. ‘Emergency’ was also a technical ...”