“... distressed and defective character. He is not yet, he writes at the age of 41, ‘sufficiently at peace with himself’. Tersely but unequivocally, the book conveys that his character was formed by bereavement. His main bereavement was the loss of his father, who was captured by the Japanese during the war, and killed in an air crash while being ...”

“... the Cabinet that made the deal, and appears, indeed, to have been the first to apply the phrase ‘peace with honour’ to the occasion, may have been the determining factor. Again, Hogg recognised that Churchill had gone too far with his infamous 1945 campaign speech claiming that Labour in power would require a Gestapo, but still he insisted that this ...”

“... is obsessively riding the New York subway when we first hear it. ‘There’s more to it,’ David Ferrie says in the same novel. ‘There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.’ Surface and secret: even when people dispute the details, the names and the numbers, they ...”

“... always identified as the Assunta by Italians, never the Assunzione. It​ is understandable that David Ekserdjian consistently adopts the modern museum-type categorisation of subjects. His massive and very impressive book is remarkable for the range of altarpieces he considers, covering the whole of Italy from the early 13th century to 1600, many of them ...”

“... favourite from the start and duly emerged as the winner. But he did not win by a short head from David Lloyd George. You have to scour the list to find him in 79th place, listed as ‘English, born Manchester (1858-1928)’. The part about Manchester is correct: Lloyd George’s father – who was not the only Welsh schoolteacher to move there – died there ...”

“... This is literally the case in its most emphatic use of the diagrid, its design for a Palace of Peace (2004-) in Kazakhstan. A pyramid, clad in stone, the apex of which is made up of stained-glass diagrids, this palace is the planned venue for the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions. In prior affirmations of modernity, too, there was ...”

“... Pauline Kael took against the rainbow at the end of David Lean’s film Doctor Zhivago. It was a ‘disgraceful effect’, she said, ‘a coarse gesture of condescension and appeasement to the Russians’, and she asked if Lean and Robert Bolt would have placed a rainbow ‘over the future of England’. Actually it’s difficult to think of David Lean placing rainbows anywhere much, and more significantly, the mood of the rainbow, if not the actual image, is fully there in Boris Pasternak’s novel, as Russian as you can get ...”

“... during the Cuban crisis Macmillan kept sending telegrams to Washington which his own Ambassador, David Ormsby-Gore, tore up, describing them as ‘practically incomprehensible’ and ‘wholly out of order’. Cradock doesn’t see Cuba as a Kennedy triumph – JFK used brother Bobby’s backchannel route to the Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, to ...”

“... for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people racialised as black have been in Britain for more than two thousand years. During the third century, North African Roman soldiers formed part of the occupation of the British Isles: ‘Aurelian Moors’ were ...”

“... man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated slavery, the pragmatic politician ...”

“... to have their dreams interpreted. Messiahs turned up roughly once a century. In 1523, it was David Reubeni, a traveller who claimed to be David, son of Solomon, and had some success touring his act around Italy: he left Rome in a flutter of glittering streamers, embroidered with the words of the Ten Commandments in ...”

“... close. ‘As we are closed to the public in the morning,’ the curator told me, ‘you will have peace and quiet to draw the specimen.’ I began my preparations. I wanted to make etchings, which I was just beginning to learn to do. I bought a small torch so I could light the skeleton and cast shadows that would turn into aquatints. I found photographs of ...”

“... clear out of Russia and leave the Russians to fight it out among themselves’. In Britain, David Lloyd George had similar reservations, but his government included a passionate supporter of the intervention, the newly appointed minister of munitions and soon to be secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill.Wilson’s scepticism meant that the ...”

“... liked Germany and negotiated the concordat did not mean, however, that he was a crypto-Nazi. As David Kertzer concludes in his new book, ‘Pope Pius XII was certainly not “Hitler’s Pope” … In many ways, the Nazi regime was anathema to the pope and to virtually all those around him in the Vatican. They were alarmed by the Reich’s efforts to weaken ...”

“... Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist historians, most prominently Ian McBride and David Livingstone, have demonstrated that the history of Ulster Presbyterianism from the 18th century is characterised by intellectual richness, an openness to science, a commitment to progress and a taste for theological heterodoxy, notwithstanding backwoods ...”