“... and for all Freedman’s subtlety, his sympathy is often with British and American leaders. David Deptula, the architect of the American bombing campaign in Iraq in 1991, is thanked in his acknowledgments. Freedman claimed that one of the central themes of Michael Howard’s work was ‘urging Americans to keep a sense of proportion and use their power ...”

“... melancholia’, ‘elite debacle’, ‘capitalist realism’, to name just a few.The historian David Edgerton has warned against the seductions of national ‘declinism’ on the left, not least because it works symbiotically with the nationalist ‘revivalism’ of the right. The claim that everything has been getting worse for decades is a gift to ...”

“... associated. The purge of 1519, for instance, which has so engrossed Gwyn’s bête noire David Starkey, was ‘a storm in a tea-cup’. The truth, pronounces Gwyn, is that the political world of Wolsey’s ascendancy was ‘not an environment where faction flourished’. It was nevertheless an environment where the Duke of Buckingham got his head ...”

“... The connoisseur of deathbeds, of the fortitude of their occupants, of the composure of the atheist David Hume, the prison visitor who liked to watch executions, and appears to have lacked Johnson’s terror of futurity, was off somewhere on business when his wife stopped living. The journal deals with his five years as the widower formed by that crisis. His ...”

“... happened and always is’. That is why the dogs never cease to tear Actaeon. I last saw him in David Lodge’s Nice Work. I have suggested a certain equivalence of myth and psychology. This may mean that they are in a way rivals. In Euripides’ Hippolytus one can sense that psychology is preparing to take over from myth. The story itself is firmly ...”

“... and provide the skills base needed by modern industry and commerce.’ To say nothing of Sir David Philips, Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils, who remarked in 1988 that ‘decisions by the Government were “progressively leading to an unstable situation”.’ Fighting words, no doubt, but they have the unmistakably musty smell of ...”

“... already complied with it when they ceded a few thousand square miles of sand to Egypt in the Camp David Accords. Still, the West Bank and Gaza Strip today contain more than a million and a half Palestinians who, under international law and the rules of the United Nations, are clearly entitled to create their own national state, just as Israel was permitted to ...”

“... Israeli officials, for a man detained as a suspect in the killings of two Palestinians. The man, David Axelrod, is not related to Leon Trotsky. A man with the same name, who is a descendant of Trotsky, was questioned briefly by the police in a case of mistaken identity. The arcane character of this item, which was at the top of that day’s menu, might make ...”

“... be attached to his intrepid voyage? Of the natives he first observed in ‘Hispaniola’, as David Brading’s book records, Colombo wrote: ‘They do not have arms and are all naked and with no ability for war and are very cowardly, so that a thousand could not resist three [Castilians] and thus they are fit to be commanded and made to work and to sow ...”

“... it even if it is the size of a tablecloth.’ At the same time, the Zionist leaders, especially David Ben-Gurion, were adept at presenting the Palestinian position as unreasonable. It is not that they weren’t interested in a compromise solution. But since the claims of the two sides could not be reconciled, it was preferable to have the Palestinians ...”

“... with sarcasm. Only once did he comment favourably on anything I wrote. It was a report in the FT suggesting that, by committing itself at the 1984 Conference to public support for Scargill, the TUC had put its credibility on the line. Scargill was acutely aware of inconveniencing the union leaders he despised, or at best regarded as assistants in a ...”

“... influence may have been transmitted via this route, it is worth considering the case of David Koresh and the Branch Davidian Seventh-Day Adventists. The siege at Waco had an uncannily Zoroastrian ending. Not only is fire, the eschatological cleanser, the sacred element of Zoroastrianism; and not only is Koresh, meaning Cyrus, the name of the ...”

“... even more important moles remained undiscovered. Sir Roger Hollis, the director-general of MI5, David Murphy, the CIA chief of Soviet Bloc Intelligence, and James Bennett, head of Canadian counter-espionage, were all denounced as likely Soviet agents by conspiracy theorists within their own services. In his recently published memoirs,* President Carter’s ...”

“... of the art in the sociology and history of psychiatry (one has only to read the later effusions of David Cooper to recognise that some very silly things are said about madness). But it also makes sense in that ample room remains for sceptical doubt about the existence of a set of culturally and historically-transcendent conditions of madness. One feels ...”

“... balance, as he did with Spooner in Pinter’s No Man’s Land. And even more so as Harry in David Storey’s Home, the latter an understated part of immense technical difficulty. Extremes are not edges and the edge is where he excels: the edge of comedy, the edge of respectability, the edge of despair. If he continues to amaze and delight, his powers ...”