“... up to be associated with it. Many of the military leaders of the First World War – Douglas Haig, David Beatty and Hamilton – were there, under the distant and autocratic leadership of Herbert Kitchener. The other great difference in 1898 was that there was no risk of repeating Gambier-Parry’s confusion of 1884. Every soldier and every newspaper reader ...”

“... might pass as an intellectual.The extravagant praise these men inspire can be a little creepy. David Foster Wallace described watching Federer as a ‘near-religious experience’, but even he couldn’t have anticipated the levels of idolatry in The Roger Federer Effect. The book brings together interviews with friends, fans and nodding acquaintances ...”

“... chosen by Ted Sorensen to be The Prince of the Kennedy Administration, is mocked, and James David Barber’s typology of Presidential Character put down. Yet Wills has no theory of leadership to put in their place or to challenge James MacGregor Burns’s subtle, historically-embedded account in his recent Leadership. For Wills, Burns belongs among the ...”

“... but out of a piece of inaccurate gossip. The Goldsmith case, though presented in the usual David-and-Goliath terms, in fact confirmed the established strength of the Eye: Goldsmith, who hadn’t been much in the public view since his elopement with Isabel Patino, ran headfirst into the magazine’s rare power to make its opponents first notorious, then ...”

“... Year of Living Dangerously.* Credit for the screen adaptation is given to Mr Koch, together with David Williamson and Peter Weir himself. Some faults in the film probably have to do with production difficulties – for instance, the fact that all the Malay characters speak Tagalog (all right for the Philippines, where the film was shot) instead of Bahasa ...”

“... they are playing, it is not clear what they are doing here, along with such as Dugald Stewart, David Ricardo, the Mills, E.A. Freeman, Alfred Marshall and Graham Wallas. Are these the First Eleven, or just the first eleven names that cropped up? When the Whigs were in charge, at least we used to have an identifiable team of All Stars, whom the fans either ...”

“... of a man facing a huge breathtaking vista of mountains, mist and sun, a version of Caspar David Friedrich’s Traveller above the Sea of Clouds. A closer look tells us that this man is engaged in painting the railing in front of him, and just now standing back to survey his handiwork. In several different countries, Cartier-Bresson will show two or ...”

“... of the same Eighties vintage: Atari and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, Warner Brothers cartoons, The Waltons and The A-Team, the film Zombie Flesh-Eaters. The novel begins in Bangkok’s backpackers’ quarter, the Khao San Road, ‘a decompression chamber for those about to leave or enter ...”

“... from adult cells, the conclusion that adult mammals could not be cloned, a journalistic hoax (David Rorvik’s announcement that he had helped a wealthy eccentric clone himself), a brilliant experimentalist (Karl Illmensee) accused of faking results, and, finally, a small band of mavericks working outside the prestigious centres of biotechnology in the ...”

“... than ‘mechanic’), who turned portraiture into the genre of choice for those with taste; David Garrick, who became, ahead of any writer, Shakespeare’s best explainer – ‘the Poet’s High Priest’, as one critic put it. Garrick was probably the most widely admired public figure of the age. This is partly because of his coming to be seen ‘as ...”

“... words, was ‘special’. In this context, Ceadel notes – but does not sufficiently heed – David Bebbington’s reminder that, for all their emphasis on a religion of the heart, evangelicals worked inside and not outside the Enlightenment rationalist tradition and so appealed to minds as well as hearts. What they shared across the denominations was ...”

“... John Hannon in a journal extract published in the Bristol magazine, Entropy. (Hannon describes how David Jay Brown and John Lilly in Mavericks of the Mind ‘discuss the notion that ketamine renders the brain directly susceptible to TV transmissions.’ And goes on that ‘Lilly even claims that he once found himself inside a TV soap opera while on ...”

“... College’). Jessy Mair was the wife of Beveridge’s cousin, and remained so until David Mair’s death in 1940, whereupon she became Lady Beveridge. By the beginning of 1921 she was installed as secretary and dean at LSE, with unique access to the director throughout his tenure. She later wrote that she had ‘established when I came to the ...”

“... Graves also has an infuriating habit of rewriting other people’s poems – and even the whole of David Copperfield – to bring them closer to what he feels the White Goddess had in mind, in the process invariably ruining them. This obsessive self-righteousness similarly limits the scope and diversity of his own work. Jarrell was surely right to insist that ...”

“... both to deter and to negotiate, and to a delighted designer of posters gave the impression on a David Frost programme that if he were running the country, only Dad’s Army would stand between us and the Warsaw forces. Had it not been for defence, one old hand in the Party thought, the Tories might even have lost. But once more, helped by the continuing ...”