“... Cannibalism and the Common Law was that it went much wider than the one earlier book on the case, Donald McCormick’s Blood on the Sea, trawling in great social and nautical circles and retrieving wonderful things. Simpson’s new book on wartime internment in Great Britain does the same, with the deliberate result that the historic case which internment ...”

“... see whether Spitzer will actually come up with anything that wouldn’t have been noticed by, say, Donald Tovey. I think he does, even if it only turns out to be a new way of thinking about an old enigma. The agenda, not only in this essay but in half the contributions to the book, is a wish to rehabilitate Haydn’s lesser known works, particularly those in ...”

“... green paper, if I remember, and featured strip cartoons of Laurel and Hardy, Flanagan and Allen, Arthur Askey, and Old Mother Riley the female impersonator.) I support this project, and I want it to be carried out skilfully, not clumsily. (‘Comic Cuts’ is an amazingly inventive account of a marathon drunken conversation, almost wholly in direct ...”

“... To the Past we must go as a relief from To-day’s harshness,’ the Egyptologist Arthur Weigall wrote in 1923, as illustrated newspapers were bringing Tutankhamun back to life. The First World War was over, but its aftershocks rippled on. Golden treasure, a boy pharaoh and lost tombs in the Valley of the Kings offered readers an escape ...”

“... and innovation and substantially reduce the quantity and quality of a nation’s output’ (as Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers put it in an October 2018 report, ‘The Opportunity Costs of Socialism’). This is the same ‘logic’ that Senator Lindsey Graham trotted out to argue against income support for US nurses in the midst of the ...”

“... new forum for Scottish nationalism, but filling it with more competition than Labour was used to. Donald Dewar, who steered Labour’s plans for devolution in the 1990s, presented this as a virtue: ‘What we have got to do is persuade Scotland that fear must be conquered and that canny caution be put on one side. The people must decide if they are prepared ...”

“... piling up on remainder tables, 1999 marked the appearance of Christopher Ricks’s successor to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse, published a hundred years ago, revised in 1939, and followed in 1972 by Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book; of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, a brashly devolutionary challenger to the Norton ...”

“... Georgian house in Hampstead, 109 Frognal, the home of the blacklisted screenwriter and playwright Donald Ogden Stewart and his journalist wife, Ella Winter. In Frognal, Sayre met Charlie Chaplin (depicted as arrogant, politically obtuse and unfunny), Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Dubois, the left-wing filmmakers Joseph Losey, Carl Foreman and Abraham Polonsky, the ...”

“... poetry and prose. Sinclair’s critical method is that of the impresario. A phrase like ‘As Donald Bain put it’ or ‘In the words of Gaven Ewart’ will be used to introduce a large hunk of the text in question, and that’s that. Sinclair’s real excitement is in recalling what a thrill it was (or must have been) to bang in to the old pub every ...”

“... uneasy and therefore middle-class subject), and he permits himself a quotation from Professor Arthur Marwick of the Open University (who knows better but pretends not to) that ‘class is too serious a subject to leave to the social scientists.’ Well – OK, fellas. Vance Packard sells better than Aristotle, and we don’t want to take ourselves too ...”

“... interest. So that’s how Boorman ended up in Soho one night discussing a bad script from a Donald Westlake novel, The Hunter, with Marvin, who was staying in London. ‘What do you think?’ Marvin wanted to know. Boorman said it was clichéd; they bonded over considering it ‘a piece of shit’.That was the start of Point Blank. Boorman thought the ...”

“... in That Noble Science of Politics (1983), cowritten with his late colleagues John Burrow and Donald Winch, which rejected the notion that a unidirectional, single-subject narrative was an adequate way of recounting a discipline’s history. The authors instead immersed themselves in unresolved contradictions: between deductive procedures derived from ...”

“... from Graham McCann’s book about Dad’s Army have been widely quoted, notably the insistence by Arthur Lowe (Mainwaring) on having a clause in his contract stipulating that in no scene would he be required to remove his trousers. Lowe, it turns out, was a sergeant-major in the war, and John Le Mesurier, who played the limp Sergeant Wilson, was a ...”

“... the CIA – and wasn’t answerable to congressional oversight. It was led by Vice-Admiral Arthur Moreau, a brilliant navy officer who would be known to those on the inside as ‘M’. He had most recently been involved, as deputy chief of naval operations, in developing the US’s new maritime strategy, aimed at restricting Soviet freedom of ...”

“... coastguard off Havana, the most consequential ear in history before those of Vincent van Gogh and Donald Trump. The British reaction had been tepid at first, and the country seemed to be basking in the long peace of which Robert Walpole boasted to the queen in 1734: ‘Madam, there are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe, and not one ...”