“... writes is without interest.’ The wearily Olympian judgment was delivered by a distinctly peeved F.S.L. Lyons, doyen of historians of modern Ireland, when faced 27 years ago with a short life of Charles Stewart Parnell which took implicit but cheeky issue with his own magnum opus on the Chief. The young Bew – Belfast-born and a graduate of People’s ...”

“... strictly experimental or popular but both, like Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski and David Cronenberg. Also distinctive is his selection of novelists; his semi-paranoid view of our ‘techno-institutional worlds’ leads Crary to turn to Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard.In 1982, Crary published a brilliant essay on horror ...”

“... had built her own Shakespearean shrine-cum-reading-room in 1742 – more than a decade before David Garrick commissioned what had previously been considered the first Temple of Shakespeare, complete with a statue by Roubiliac, for his own garden at Hampton – made me sufficiently curious to want to renew my attempt to see her former house and ...”

“... culture with ‘an ongoing global process of political liberation from Western rule’, as David Murphy puts it. To drive this point home, representatives of Swapo from what is now Namibia, the African People’s Union from Zimbabwe and the ANC and Pan-Africanist Congress from South Africa were invited, and marched in the opening ceremony, a street ...”

“... powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur ...”

“... novel called Bobbed Hair and a song about flappers to the musical No Sirree! She collaborated with F.P. Adams on a book about the men and women they wouldn’t marry (‘no species rare’), and with Elmer Rice on a play, Close Harmony, which had a short run in 1924. She also published two collections of verse. Unusually for poetry, Enough Rope (1926) and ...”

“... had indeed been consigned to the scrapheap. Liverpool were playing Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-final at the dilapidated Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. The officer in charge, chief superintendent David Duckenfield, was grossly underprepared. When a crush developed at the entrance for Liverpool fans shortly ...”

“... was fifty. In a prophetic essay that appeared during the high Thatcher years, the young historian David Cannadine wrote in the LRB (6 June 1985) that ‘Briggs has often been described as a steam-engine scholar, pounding along the tracks of historical endeavour like an express train at full throttle.’ No ascetic, he loved good food and drink as much as ...”

“... Blackheath, the list of architects’ self-designed houses is long: Peter Moro, Brian Meeking, David Branch (whose elegant, Miesian case study-style house has now been demolished), Leo Rubinstein, Paul Tvrtkovic, Ray Smith and Ronald Coleman. Most of these were deadpan little houses, in brick with exposed concrete frames, often with small windows onto the ...”

“... Truman didn’t trust Oppenheimer.In 1949, Alvarez and Lawrence lobbied the AEC chairman, David Lilienthal. He wasn’t keen, writing in his diary that the Berkeley pair seemed ‘bloodthirsty’: ‘Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez in here drooling over the hydrogen bomb. Is this all we have to offer?’ They found receptive politicians soon ...”

“... were preventing the private sector taking on public land to build badly needed new homes. In 2010 David Cameron commissioned Philip Green to conduct an ‘efficiency review’ for the new coalition government, and he duly reported that the state, ‘the largest tenant/owner in the country’, was ‘wholly inefficient’ when it came to the use and management ...”

“... engagements with prostitutes patronised by other members of the libertine Hellfire Club. In 1776, David Hume reported that Banks and Sandwich had gone fishing, joined by ‘two or three Ladies of pleasure’. Everybody knew this sort of thing about Banks, and there’s no evidence that he much minded the satires or that they did him any damage. Wealth has its ...”

“... It was the moment, in the mid-1950s, when worlds were beginning to collide. Tennant’s uncle David ran the louche but artistic Gargoyle Club in Soho, where the old aristocracy mixed with the new celebrity. Princess Margaret met Lucian Freud and Ian Fleming; Tennant’s previous girlfriend, Ivy Nicholson, became part of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and Jeanne ...”

“... at a million pounds apiece, will be painted European green and dispersed to other barracks. David Cameron announced in December 2013 that the troops could come home because their mission had been accomplished. ‘The prime minister’s declaration of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack ...”

“... in jobs. In 2010 France embarked on a spectacular eviction programme – Roma again – and David Cameron pledged to bring down annual net migration to the UK from hundreds to ‘tens of thousands’, a fantastic notion unless Britain left the European Union and refused entry to ever growing numbers of British returnees – 80,000 plus in 2008 ...”