“... Melbourne spent two winters in Glasgow, living plainly and studying with John Millar, disciple of David Hume and Adam Smith, and one of the most influential proselytisers for the Scottish Enlightenment. This experience gave him a strong commitment to the principles of political economy; it also profoundly influenced his thinking on the relationship between ...”

“... was closer to the sentiments of those who had opposed Charles I in 1641-43 than to those of the King and his supporters. But that did nothing for Cromwell’s reputation; there was still no place for him. He was anathema to Royalists as a republican regicide, and to radical Whigs as a quasi-Royalist. Roundhead sympathisers admired what he had done in the ...”

“... spirit of the selection of Rochester’s works for 1691) strenuously elided the scene in which the King makes love to his catamite. The Rochester of 1691 may not have been the whole poet, but then neither was the Rochester of 1680. The compiler of Poems 1691 restored to the poet his emotional intelligence, his sensitivity and his seriousness. The new poems ...”

“... of his immediate family, had competed with one another to bring him the good news. As with a king, no one wants to be the bearer of grim tidings, but everyone wanted to be the one to say this was going to be huge. Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, phoned him early to report: ‘It’s happening.’ Jason Miller, his senior election ...”

“... on Eliot’s imagination, but has always claimed to like the sonnet ‘Idylls of the King’ which provoked all the London Review controversy, and he reprints it here. It is terrifying to imagine what he might say about a poem he really disliked: he has accused it of being rhythmically inert and simplistically nostalgic for a Christian past ...”

“... Palmers. When Edward VII went to sea with Sir Thomas Lipton, it was noted with surprise that the King ‘had gone yachting with his grocer’; when the first J.J. Sainsbury died, his last words were, reputedly: ‘Keep the shops well lit.’ ‘To be conscious of our forefathers as they really were and, bit by bit, to reconstruct the mosaic of the long ...”

“... the power to decide the meaning of words – the ultimate scoring system. For Hobbes, the king must choose what is good and what is bad, what is war and what is peace, which sounds distinctly Orwellian. Surely, Nguyen suggests, we must be free to decide these things for ourselves? And it’s a short step from Hobbes to Jeremy Bentham, the man behind ...”

“... 2004. Seasons Four and Five picked up just under two years later. The creator of The Wire is David Simon, who wrote many of the episodes and by the third season was executive producer. He is a reporter who became a full-time writer of books: Homicide (1991) and, with Ed Burns, The Corner (1997), both of which were turned into successful TV series. Both ...”

“... later to serve as one of London’s first cinemas). Other French paintings, including a version of David’s Coronation of Napoleon, with its dazzling profusion of documentary details, were shown separately in London in the same period. By the mid-century touring exhibitions were taking some popular English pictures such as John Martin’s Great Day of his ...”

“... own study until October 2020, following the demonstrations inspired by the murder of George Floyd. David W. Blight, director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Centre for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, was chosen to lead the Yale and Slavery Research Project. The result is Yale and Slavery, an analytical narrative that considers institutional ...”

“... David Daniell is also the author of the only full-length critical study of Buchan’s work – The Interpreter’s House (1975). Both there and here, in the introduction to this collection of 12 of Buchan’s stories, he is concerned to defend the writer against the usual accusations of anti-semitism, racism and blatant imperialism; to protest against the way he is automatically ranked with Sapper, Dornford Yates and similar figures; and to assert that he is not only worth reading (which the general public has never forgotten), but also worth reading seriously ...”

“... journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell believed, Sher writes, that an ‘infidel’ writer such as Hume had no right to such marks of ‘politeness and respect’ from Christian ...”

“... the poster boy for gang moronics, for self-destructive, incommensurate revenge? According to David Grossman, all Jewish children when they first hear the story learn to call him Samson the Hero. He is wrong about this, but then my Jewish childhood was not in Hebrew or in Israel. I recall the Samson story mainly as an early introduction to the power of ...”

“... image handed down in history books and conversation, which is plainly not good enough.’ It is David Bromwich’s aim in The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke that people should know a good deal more about what Burke actually said and wrote. This is the first of two projected volumes; the second will cover the two great causes of Burke’s later life: the ...”

“... portray the Zionist pioneers waging a war of independence against the British oppressor. Jon and David Kimche provided a good example of the conventional Israeli analysis of British policy in Both Sides of the Hill: Britain and the Palestine War (1960). ‘It was a mixture of ignorance, blundering, indecision and local bias against the Jews, encouraged by ...”