“... cunning and high spirits.’ That comes as close as anything. The unperplexedness of the story means that it knows what it is doing and where it is going, but neither knows nor cares what it means. An invisible barrier separates old from new fairy stories, like the glass wall round the princess in Andrew Lang’s Crimson ...”

“... Did it hold the political whiphand? In the second volume of his trilogy on the City since 1815, David Kynaston repeatedly shows his familiarity with the controversies. But his technique is to deal fair-mindedly and unexceptionably with them, more or less in passing; the book makes no claim to be an incisive or provocative analysis of the City’s role in ...”

“... words a day; but since some days apparently only merited a few lines and others none at all, this means that it was not uncommon for a day to receive a thousand or even fifteen hundred words of description. In a way this is fair enough, since few people are as busy as a conscientious Cabinet Minister, and there is plenty to record. All the same, the mind ...”

“... old George’ of Poplar had come to personify grassroots Labour in much the same way as David Blunkett of the ‘socialist republic’ of South Yorkshire did in the late 1970s. Shepherd sees Lansbury’s evolution into a Cockney icon as a parable of the working-class boy made good by a conversion to socialism. But some of the photographs which ...”

“... is heard to mutter: ‘You’ll be wanting the gold fillings out of their teeth next.’ 2) The David Irving libel trial in February. Reading from the transcript of an interview with Irving on Australian television, Richard Rampton QC, barrister for the defence, asks why Irving had said that the idea of black men playing cricket for England made him feel ...”

“... to put people right about other people is incorrigible, indeed obsessional. In his review of David Cecil’s biography of Max Beerbohm Malcolm Muggeridge allowed it to be a graceful job of work, but said it missed the real point about Beerbohm and his lifestyle, which was that he concealed his Jewish origins and was a crypto-homosexual. Of ...”

“... of the poets’, a title that has little to do with Grub Street or Samuel Johnson. The favoured means of escape for Jonathan’s colleagues consists in finding an even more constricting straitjacket, a solitary cell that women cannot enter. We hear of a writer burying himself in a sub-basement padlocked from the inside, and of another who is becoming a ...”

“... of a very old idea: the Quantity Theory of Money. This theory, clearly present in the work of David Hume and David Ricardo, was formalised in the work of Alfred Marshall, A.C. Pigou and Irving Fisher at the beginning of this century. With the rise of Keynesianism, however, the primary lesson of the old-time religion ...”

“... into a wide range of matters of public interest, from the Aberfan disaster to the death of David Kelly, Profumo to tabloid phone hacking. On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war – to investigate, as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, put it, ‘the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made ...”

“... its constitutional prerogatives). The Trilateral Commission – a discussion group founded by David Rockefeller to bring together policymakers, academics and journalists from North America, Western Europe and Japan – put out a controversial report in 1975 titled The Crisis of Democracy, which argued that an overload of welfare responsibilities was ...”

“... to find some students who have gone pot-holing and not come up. A young caver from our village, David Anderson, is one of the rescue team. The water is rising and as he is going down he slips into a narrow gulley. Though he is roped up, the force of the torrent is too much for his companions: as they struggle to pull him out, his light still shining through ...”

“... have studied the elaborate system of rules and structures that make an ‘infinite use of finite means’ – Wilhelm von Humboldt’s description of the unbounded combinatorial power of language. According to Pinker, the dominance of rationalism in linguistics is now being challenged by the model of ‘connectionist networks’, the modern embodiment of ...”

“... political lethargy – one of the scourges of our day – should be banished, since it means that in human affairs anything is possible.’ This is empirically not the case. Roberts ignores the central ideological paradox of modern history, as formulated by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In contrast to ...”

“... an agenda, and it’s closer to the Marx Brothers than Saturday Night Live or The Daily Show. This means the best jokes are casual and anarchic, stumbled on no doubt in the frenzy of writing episode after episode. One of them, though, was stumbled on very early, in 1990, in the episode called ‘There’s No Disgrace like Home’, in which the whole family ...”

“... to staff the opposition’s attack did the line change – without apology. Grozny – the name means ‘terrible’ or ‘threatening’ – is a town of some 400,000 people, the only town of size in Chechnya. It is poor even by post-Soviet standards, with a few large administration buildings grouped round Freedom Square, a large oil refinery on the ...”