“... and to stimulate concern about the grotesque distortions created by the British electoral system. David Steel’s most formidable single contribution has been to begin the education of his own party, quite apart from the general public, in the inevitability of coalition governments. If survival-and-revival is a fact, the new role of the Liberal Party is less ...”

“... second book; I don’t know the first, The Notebook of Gismondo Cavaletti, but it won the David Higham Prize and is described in a Nina Bawden review quoted on the flap of the new one as ‘confident’. In the Dark has all the marks of a brave but not altogether confident search for something different to say. Few novels have been written about ...”

“... paternalism’. Perhaps the jocundly pastoral, fresh-faced musicians and dancers in David Allan’s famous painting of a ‘Highland Wedding at Blair Atholl’, which is reproduced as her dust-jacket, are less idealised than one has supposed. Whatever good there was in 18th-century ways of life in Scotland – and notwithstanding the brief ...”

“... The debate between Porter and Murray lies at the heart of modern Australian poetry. In 1986, David Kinloch and I organised a festival of Australian poetry at St John’s College, Oxford and invited Porter to speak about contemporary Australian poetry. In his talk Porter paid tribute to Murray, whom he described as the greatest Australian poet. We already ...”

“... in the hope that they will defuse opposition to their schemes: it would be uncharitable to David Blunkett to suppose that he really was as naive as he pretended to be in pronouncing biometric ID foolproof. The more disturbing fact is that he could say it and expect to be believed. Given Kahneman’s title, one might expect a paean to deliberation, the ...”

“... below); the equestrian portrait of Niccolò da Tolentino in the Duomo; and the windswept David, painted on a leather shield now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In a lost Assumption of the Virgin, it is said, he portrayed himself as Judas. There is no doubting Andrea’s impact among his contemporaries: a challenging figure with a ...”

“... zealots, wondering if it had some connection with Britain’s commercial stake in Iran. In 1951, David Astor’s Observer was no less protective of British interests when it described Mossadegh as a ‘fanatic’ and a ‘tragic Frankenstein … obsessed with one xenophobic idea’. ‘There was disquiet across the white world,’ de Bellaigue writes, at ...”

“... Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist historians, most prominently Ian McBride and David Livingstone, have demonstrated that the history of Ulster Presbyterianism from the 18th century is characterised by intellectual richness, an openness to science, a commitment to progress and a taste for theological heterodoxy, notwithstanding backwoods ...”

“... Camp Ashraf after the invasion came away convinced that the group could be a useful ally. General David Phillips, a military policeman who spent time there in 2004, argues that the MEK is no more a cult than the US marines: in both organisations you have to wear a uniform, obey orders and follow rituals that seem bizarre to the uninitiated. Positive feelings ...”

“... hardly see the sky. The cafés have charming names that ‘read like a Levantine requiem’, as David Holden wrote of old Alexandrian phonebooks. From the terrace of the fish restaurant where I had lunch, I watched children playing on the beach; a few women were in bikinis, a rare sight in a city where more and more women wear full niqabs, including black ...”

“... don’t lose their passport in the process. Rodgers goes on to address the Marxist arguments of David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, which hold that postmodern cultural fragmentation is connected to the shift from the Fordist national economies of the first part of the 20th century to the post-Fordist global economy of the last part. In the Marxist view, the ...”

“... the aspect of free market economics that Conservatives – even supposedly bright ones like David ‘Two Brains’ Willetts – stubbornly fail to absorb is that unintended consequences apply just as much to market-oriented panaceas as to statist policies. Cameron’s political achievement may have been to decontaminate and then quickly recontaminate ...”

“... on Brunel’s Great Western Railway. Studies of Faraday’s experimental sophistication (by David Gooding) and his Sandemanian faith (by Geoffrey Cantor) have deepened, rather than challenged, our sense of his eminence. James’s work, meanwhile – in his own publications and his DNB entry on Faraday – has highlighted Faraday’s importance as a ...”

“... Journalism) to more than 90 per cent of all the deaths in drone strikes (the ex-military officers David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum). In March 2012, the New York Times reported that all military-age males, armed or unarmed, are considered to be combatants unless there is posthumous evidence proving otherwise; the Obama administration recently disputed ...”

“... for themselves by taking outrageous risks. But the war reporters I knew best who died, such as David Blundy in El Salvador in 1989 and Marie Colvin in Syria in 2012, were highly experienced. Their only mistake was to go to dangerous places so frequently that there was a high chance that they would one day be hit by a bullet or a bomb. Messy guerrilla ...”