“... years to get them into a form with which he was satisfied. His principal discoveries – the three laws of motion and the explanation of gravity and planetary motion in terms of universal attraction – were simple and elegant and easy to understand, and one of his early drafts was written methodo populari, as he put it, to ensure that it ‘could be widely ...”

“... up to the death of George VI, and keeping all four of the brothers as well as their wives and in-laws in her sights, she manages to convey the way the much rehearsed events unfolded through quirks of circumstance and individual temperament. With the death of George V in 1936 the Victorian age finally came to an end. John Betjeman’s poem, published the ...”

“... of having a thin conception of society – unless by society we mean social democracy rather than laws, schools, churches, families and firms. As Rodgers points out, even Hayek’s most influential student, Margaret Thatcher, when she stated that ‘there is no such thing as society,’ added a rider regarding the irreducibly social and institutional nature ...”

“... Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other ...”

“... imposing so-called civilisation on others. ‘I used to think that the people who created these laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers, ahead of their time.’ There is plenty more of this quietly savage tone in Diary of a Bad Year, and lots about the facility at Guantánamo Bay and ...”

“... are not variable confessions but different worlds, and different instruments of understanding. David Kepesh in The Dying Animal offers a strong sidelight on Roth in The Plot against America, a comic view of liberty and nation which darkens and widens in the new novel. Kepesh, divorced and determined never to make the mistake of marriage again, takes true ...”

“... Duffy calls ‘famous, fatuous, but fatally quotable’. Among the living, Duffy takes issue with David Loades, the biographer of Mary who, while he has modified his earlier views on the ineffectiveness of the Marian bishops and their campaign, still believes (in Duffy’s account of his position) that they did ‘too little, too late’ to restore England to ...”

“... atolls had contributed to a widespread scepticism about the bomb. In 1984, the new prime minister, David Lange, announced that he would make the country a nuclear-free zone – a policy hated by the US but popular, then as now, in New Zealand. When New Zealand began to refuse permission for nuclear-powered ships to enter its ports, the US suspended New Zealand ...”

“... and synthetic fibres as well as cars. Plentiful cheap labour, corporatist employment laws and close relations between banks, suppliers and producers meant that economic policies had rapid effects. Centralised industrial planning encouraged the standardisation and automation of production as well as innovations in logistics. From the 1970s until ...”

“... stations; limiting voting hours; harassing and threatening would-be voters; introducing voter-ID laws such as the Crosscheck programme, which made it a lot harder for people of colour to register to vote. Or because of the FBI’s intervention in the election; or because of years of negative media coverage; or because of foreign intervention designed to ...”

“... which broadly complements the illuminating recent sketches of Henrician politics by the historian David Starkey. Thomas Starkey’s proposals are rooted in the Lancastrian conciliarism of the Middle Ages, when the peerage had kept the crown in check. The nostalgic or reactionary component of the Dialogue is repeatedly evident. We see it in Starkey’s ...”

“... to be said for taking the dim view, including the fact that the British kept the Fascist racial laws, even after they were scrapped in Italy. The implacably pro-Ethiopian Sylvia Pankhurst was rightly horrified by the British decision to seize and dismantle valuable quantities of plant and ship them out of the territory. Eritrea also doubled for the British ...”

“... first dawning sense of the historicity of society so rudely awakened by the French Revolution. David Wittenberg does much better than this, but his remarkable hypothesis is only one of the conceptual breakthroughs in this stimulating contribution to literary theory. I will dwell mainly on the three that interest me the most: the relationship of SF to ...”

“... controversy by whose lurid light his subsequent work was prejudged and has been judged ever since. David Womersley – now Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford – stands at the head of those scholars who try to situate Gibbon in his 18th-century context, thus raising and trying to answer many questions, of which that just framed is central to the ...”

“... Slessor’s good works on the Upper Niger still earn her an image on Scottish banknotes, while David Livingstone became the world’s best-known Scotsman. They did not save many souls. After 50 years’ work in India, the missions could show only 3359 converts. But their influence on empire was deep and paradoxical, at once the advance guard of colonialism ...”