“... but announced in late April that he wouldn’t be speaking. Another GB News regular, the historian David Starkey, did appear, telling the audience that anti-racist campaigners ‘only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture’. GB News has recorded huge losses but its owners seem unconcerned. Its payroll features several Tory MPs on decent ...”

“... C.L.R. James and others whose impact on the political sphere was arguably greater. The price Perry Anderson pays for being discussed at length here is to be regarded as an example of an ‘intellectualist’ tendency that arranges a list of big names into the patterns of a ‘stark geometry’. Taylor’s CND activism is treated more favourably, perhaps ...”

“... to detect this temporal exchange. When Nead describes Miss Havisham’s Satis House in David Lean’s adaptation of Great Expectations (1946) as a ‘Gothic bombsite’ – which it wasn’t – we are assured that it exhibits the ‘colour of the period’, which seems to mean low-key lighting, glutinous blackness and overwrought decor. Cinema is ...”

“... end pick up the pieces. And it will. Downing Street’s first-choice strategy for the outing of David Kelly – writing, semi-publicly, to the Intelligence and Security Committee to offer him as a witness – was vetoed by Ann Taylor MP, the Committee’s chairman, whose staff refused to be sent the suggested letter. In her testimony to the Inquiry, Taylor ...”

“... Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism (1989), Fukuyama’s The End of History (1991) and Perry Anderson’s essays in A Zone of Engagement, for example. I know the spectrum of positions there is a wide one, which should not be tidied up to make it look more coherent than it is. It ranges from what Geoffrey Hawthorn, reviewing ...”

“... the same. I have been particularly struck by this on following up a reference to a paper by Alan Anderson published in the Bulletin of the Society of labour History in 1971 on the deliberations of the Legislative Committee set up by Baldwin’s Cabinet in the aftermath of the General Strike of 1926. Then, if ever, you might expect to have seen legislation ...”

“... of the Taliban, sometimes for their tactical ability but mostly for their bravery. Major Martin David, whose thoughtfulness made him seem a reluctant warrior, said: ‘Even when they’re onto a complete loser, they insist on pushing forward. On the one hand you have to admire that determination. On the other hand you feel sort of sad. It’s just a shame ...”

“... in a brand-new, sharp-focus print at the National Film Theatre and the Screen on the Hill, was a David O. Selznick film, ‘a picturisation’ as the title credits have it, of a very successful novel. ‘We bought Rebecca,’ Selznick wrote in a memo objecting strenuously to a first draft of the screenplay, ‘and we intend to make Rebecca.’ That was the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... New Nations, organised by the Parsons-derived sociologist Edward Shils and the political scientist David Apter. Geertz quotes from Shils’s amusingly unself-conscious, Cold War-imperial foundational essay: The categories we employ are the same as the ones we employ in our studies of our own societies, and they postulate the fundamental affinities of all ...”

“... The American investigative columnist Jack Anderson has had some scoops in his time but none more significant than his revelation – in January 1990 – that in mid-March 1989, three months after Lockerbie, George Bush rang Margaret Thatcher to warn her to ‘cool it’ on the subject. On what seems to have been the very same day, perhaps a few hours earlier, Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Transport, Paul Channon, was the guest of five prominent political correspondents at a lunch at the Garrick Club ...”

“... in Russia, Greece, Poland and Hungary, as well as Taiwan and Iran. The other prominent declinist, David Thomson, wasn’t even convinced of that. The only director in Sontag’s contemporary pantheon who featured in the edition of Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film that I owned was the oldest, Theo Angelopoulos, and in his entry Thomson lamented that ...”

“... influence on the generations that followed. Following Osborne’s death in 1994, however, David Hare, among others, leaped to the playwright’s defence, in his memorial eulogy and a longer lecture first delivered in 2002 and repeated on the stage of the Royal Court on the 50th anniversary of Look Back in Anger’s opening. Now John Heilpern has taken ...”

“... fortune through some startling and, on occasion, clandestine publishing and movie contracts, as David Reynolds has shown in his riveting In Command of History. Then there is self-justification after retirement, which almost always produces memoirs of numbing boredom: I assume – or hope – that no one alive has actually read every page of all the volumes ...”

“... so he could talk to the president alone. He told them he had a personal message to convey from David Cameron. In fact, he used the time to pursue some business on behalf of Tony Blair Associates, his commercial calling card. He wanted to sell the Nigerians Israeli drones and other military equipment for use in their fight against Islamic rebels. If true ...”