“... 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 ...”

“... only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail ...”

“... social space by both Sadat’s regime (the Brothers were briefly suppressed for opposing the Camp David agreement) and Mubarak’s. They were able to build a large network of Islamic charitable, educational and cultural associations, as well as hospitals and clinics, giving them a social presence that none of the legal parties could rival. They were also able ...”

“... no roots in the labour movement (which doubtless commended him to Blair) and is, if anything, a David Owenite social moderniser. His own schooling is an important part of his political personality. He went to Kingham Hill School, a boarding school for disadvantaged children, and often speaks of his debt to it: ‘I owe more than I can possibly say, or ever ...”

“... spreads (increments over Libor) they offered. Two experienced industry observers, Mark Adelson and David Jacob, suggest that a fatal point was reached when CDOs became almost the only purchasers of the riskier tranches of mortgage-backed securities. Previously, those tranches had either been guaranteed against default by specialist insurers, or bought by canny ...”

“... if startled to find it there. My abstraction allows the staff to talk across me: ‘Kim said that David should apologise to Jules, but I said he should apologise to Samira, and she said he should apologise to Suzanne, and Suzanne said she wasn’t going to apologise to anyone, ever. But I think they should all apologise to me.’ Controlled movements still ...”

“... I mistake it, witnessing in England the gradual disappearance of the old landed classes.’ As David Cannadine remarks in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, ‘five hundred years of patrician landownership had effectively been halted and reversed in seventy.’ True, if you draw up a list of the great property owners today, the same names ...”

“... population has doubled since 1968, but Malthusian doomsaying still flourishes. National treasure David Attenborough now announces that population growth is ‘out of control’; that human beings are a ‘plague on the earth’; that unless urgent action is taken, nature will take its terrible revenge; and that ‘sending bags of flour’ to starving ...”

“... an undeclared nuclear weapons programme. The team was led by an aggressive IAEA inspector called David Kay, though it was not really an IAEA operation but a US one: the deputy chief inspector, the American diplomat Bob Gallucci, called most of the shots. ‘The team,’ Gallucci said in 2001, ‘was very, very special … we had a lot of team members with ...”

“... for example, or Maureen Forrester – and then follow this by listening to a countertenor, David Daniels, for example, or Andreas Scholl, or Iestyn Davies (or go on YouTube and listen to a recording of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922, singing the Bach-Gounod ‘Ave Maria’, with what Feldman called a vibrato that is ‘often ...”

“... publication, he was nominated for election as an associate of the Linnean Society. According to David Attenborough, Lear is ‘the finest bird artist there ever was’. His drawings were primarily intended to help scientists identify species, yet his birds are exhibitionists as well as exhibits, always more than an instance that confirms a rule. The same ...”