“... take a different view as to whether, in this context, the word ‘Marxist’ was, or might be held to be, defamatory by a jury. To this uncertainty is added another: the cost. Who knows what damages may be awarded? Who knows at the start of a libel action what the lawyers’ bills will turn out to be? The Daily Mail defended a case against the ...”

“... of what’s past, present, or to come: insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal’. David Smith finds most of this description eminently applicable to H.G. Wells (whom he intensely admires) and he adopts its final two words as a subtitle for his biography. What sense Shakespeare attached to them is doubtful. Johnson suggests ‘likely to die in ...”

“... now comprise around 160 Alliance, 180 Labour and 280 Conservative MPs – and the new books by David Butler and Vernon Bogdanor would have vanished beneath a stampede of eager buyers. As things are, though the distorted election results have robbed them of some of their topicality, they will be very widely and minutely studied by politicians, students of ...”

“... managed to acquire small plots for their families. Paul and Jim Hargis remained on their farm and held onto it tenaciously. As Nathans points out, in subsequent years they pledged all sorts of property as security for loans from local merchants – crops, cows, horses, wagons – but almost never the land itself. They kept it for the rest of their lives.Not ...”

“... If they’re good enough for Harold Koh, they’re good enough for me.’ Koh recently held a visiting professorship at NYU Law School, where this spring a handful of students wrote an open letter questioning his fitness to teach human rights. Koh’s defenders immediately responded with a letter of their own signed by dozens of legal ...”

“... Still, for all the pathos, Callaghan was 68 when he resigned in 1980, the only man to have held all four of the great offices of state, and had been in Parliament since 1945. It wasn’t a bad effort. Longevity is increasingly rare in British politics. We have got used to political careers coming abruptly to a halt, defeated prime ministers leaving ...”

“... located at the ‘addresses’ we type into our browsers. All .uk domain names, for example, are held on a database run by a not-for-profit private company called Nominet, which is based in Oxford. When you type https://www.lrb.co.uk into your browser, a few packets of data are sent via your internet service provider to Nominet’s database, which sends them ...”

“... to photograph Emma Hamilton’s ‘attitudes’, curiosity about those poses and why they were held to be so affecting would be satisfied. He found, I guess, the business of making the ‘surrealised portraits’ and others with backgrounds of blown up scripts and press cuttings, or the double exposures, or the photographic collages, or the pictures of ...”

“... there was an achievement in his resistance. ‘Is this man simply not cut out for the job?’ David Cameron asked at Prime Minister’s Question Time. Unlike the subject of his biography, Brown has held high office, but he’s a less successful public speaker, he doesn’t have Maxton’s enormous smile and he doesn’t ...”

“... or immerse himself in it for too long, setting out on long walks and trips alone, as his alter ego David Copperfield does in moments of depression when society seems to offer only disappointment. A year after his admission to the Garrick, Dickens resigned from it. In each of the following three decades he would rejoin the Garrick and resign again in protest ...”

“... and its eclectic membership included the philosopher Bernard Williams, the sports commentator David Coleman and the agony aunt Marje Proops. The report they produced two years later was measured, intelligent, elegantly written, slightly agonised and almost wholly ineffectual. The Rothschild Commission accepted that the law on gambling in Britain remained ...”

“... harsh and inviolable. Even Wilson’s feisty subject timed her pleasures to its unalterable rhythm.David Henkin sets out to discover how Americans became such creatures of the seven-day week. By the time the United States was founded as an independent republic, he writes, North Americans were already ‘by the contemporary standards of Europe … particularly ...”

“... when it came to Gillray’s turn he made them all kneel reverentially and drink to Jacques-Louis David, a notorious republican, as the “first painter and patriot in Europe”.’ The anecdote is second-hand but entirely credible, and the question only occurs later: could he have meant it? No one was sure at the time. Draper Hill surmised that the meeting ...”

“... as an experimental novelist, but the narrative slackness of these books isn’t like that of David Markson’s novels, for instance, which have the minimalist, unnerving rhythm of a needle trapped in the final groove of a record. Their dark outlook isn’t like that of Thomas Bernhard, whose cynicism is driven by a kind of grim joy, nor do they have the ...”

“... is not always so. It does apply if the information you want to know is information about yourself held by some public body. It also applies to a lot of information relevant to public decisions. The book that Des Wilson has edited, on behalf of the Campaign for Freedom of Information in Britain, brings out, in a section on international comparisons, how ...”