“... powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur ...”

“... had built her own Shakespearean shrine-cum-reading-room in 1742 – more than a decade before David Garrick commissioned what had previously been considered the first Temple of Shakespeare, complete with a statue by Roubiliac, for his own garden at Hampton – made me sufficiently curious to want to renew my attempt to see her former house and ...”

“... coffee plantations, and a handful threw in their lot with the FNLA. But the ethnic strains, which David Birmingham describes very well in his new history of Angola, were too great for this arrangement to last: in 1966 Jonas Savimbi, an ambitious and volatile character, left the FNLA to embark on a venture of his own, Unita (União Nacional para a ...”

“... of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in 2015, including Thomas Piketty and David Blanchflower (who tweeted ‘he has no economic policies’). Corbyn’s former policy chief, Neale Coleman, who was often described as the most effective member of his team, has now been announced as a top adviser to his opponent in the leadership ...”

“... the greenhouse effect on earth. At the prompting of a geochemist and oceanographer called Charles David Keeling, the observatory of Mauna Loa on Hawaii had been collecting data on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1959. The result – the ‘Keeling curve’ – clearly showed that levels of atmospheric CO2 were rising sharply. In 1979, Jimmy Carter ...”

“... her and forced her into his car. Its remit has now been expanded: it will also look at how David Carrick, nicknamed ‘Bastard Dave’ by his colleagues in the Met, raped and sexually assaulted at least twelve women over a period of seventeen years without being prosecuted. The Casey report into ‘standards and culture’ at the Met, prompted by the ...”

“... and ethical substance to this Establishment philistinism. For him, it was going home. Paul Johnson in his tribute to Fuller in the Sunday Telegraph wrote: ‘He insisted that art criticism had become the prisoner not only of an undistinguished clique but of a base and repellent vernacular. He aimed to restore it to English literature.’ Peter Fuller ...”

“... this happens.’ The moment had come to fix the blame where it properly belonged: not on Lyndon Johnson, not on Richard Nixon, but, as Burke points out, on the oldest story in the world, ‘the seductive woman who turns out to be a snake’. Last year, the Fonda cult allowed thousands, even millions of anguished veterans and their sympathisers to hold onto ...”

“... Guided at times by Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner and David Brion Davis conceived slavery as a mode of organising labour, as well as a system of racial domination. This led to the recognition that advocates of ‘free labour’ had economic as well as humanitarian reasons for opposing slavery, and that the Northern ...”

“... now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. David Hume liked this story, and in 1741 retold it in his marvellous essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he wrestled with the question of whether such delicacy of judgment was really possible. Some people doubted any such thing, but he did not. Writing in ...”

“... of admired speeches given on ever larger stages (up to various arts advisory committees in Lyndon Johnson’s White House). But the thing that made Ellison’s life truly complicated after Invisible Man was his steady promise of a spectacular second novel, begun in the mid-1950s, which he worked on, though never finished, for forty years, all the way up to ...”

“... the Black Dwarf.’ We had a vote, and everyone was in favour, which was rare – I think even David Mercer, who was the most grumpy attendant at these meetings. So that’s how it happened, and we raised money for a broadsheet, the first broadsheet on Mayday 1968, and people poured in with offers of help. When I think back on it, it was quite ...”

“... We learn a great deal about his visual passions, for the 17th-century Dutch painters, for Caspar David Friedrich (Two Men Contemplating the Moon was part of the inspiration for Waiting for Godot) and, supremely, Cézanne (a late self-portrait attracted the quintessentially Beckettian description ‘overwhelmingly sad. A blind broken old man’). Cronin, on ...”

“... from a group of people, a remarkable chorus, club or consensus composed of Robert Burns, David Hume and Henry Cockburn, while the nearby estate of Auchinleck, mentioned in an additional stanza contained in one version of the poem, was called ‘romantic’ by a son of the house, James Boswell. Kyle counts, then, as a highly romantic vicinity. But it ...”

“... especially jaunty excursion to Scotland. ‘These people are strong, shrewd,’ warns a certain Dr Johnson. ‘Be not deceiv’d by any level of the Exotick they may present you, Kilts, Bag-Pipes sort of thing. Haggis. You must keep eternal Vigilance.’ Mason considers himself warned.But what actually happens in it? Well. Dixon is a rollicking country lad, a ...”