“... version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, and David O. Selznick’s 1939 super-production Gone with the Wind ‘provide the scaffolding for American film history’ – although it takes us no further than the eve of the Second World War. This reading of Hollywood is anticipated by Leslie Fiedler’s ...”

“... James Simpson first successfully used chloroform, the German Gustav Kirchhoff spelled out the laws of electric currents in a network of wires and Carl Zeiss opened an optics factory in Jena, Switzerland. It was the year Alfred Krupp cast his first steel gun and an Italian called Ascanio Sobrero produced nitroglycerine; it was the year of the first ...”

“... won the day. To cite Berlin’s own litany, we find his basic line of argument taken up by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, to some degree by John Stuart Mill and even more closely (Berlin might have added) by Henry Sidgwick. This great tradition of classical utilitarianism proved impressively successful at occupying the entire conceptual space, thereby ...”

“... A Life is thus enriched not only by recent studies of the biographical archive (notably David Thomas’s Shakespeare in the Public Records, 1985, and Robert Bearman’s Shakespeare in the Stratford Records, 1994) but by the work of Peter Thomson and Andrew Gurr on the fortunes of Elizabethan acting companies, or of Douglas Bruster on Troilus and ...”

“... be no clash of civilisations because Muslims didn’t have one – Denmark brought in a round of laws making it difficult for citizens to marry partners from outside the EU and impossible if they were under 24. In 2004, a bold proposal in Germany to widen the selective recruitment of migrants was struck down and the 1973 ban on foreign labour was left ...”

“... diplomats have all called on Thein Sein. Each has returned cautious, but unmistakably impressed. David Cameron, who this week became the most important visitor so far, urged us all to ‘pay tribute … to the leadership of President Thein Sein and his government, which has been prepared to release political prisoners, hold by-elections and legalise ...”

“... house. Within hours of her murder Tony Blair spoke of it as ‘a disgusting act of barbarity’. David Andrews, the Irish Foreign Minister, said that it was ‘clearly designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few of them threw petrol bombs at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... no roots in the labour movement (which doubtless commended him to Blair) and is, if anything, a David Owenite social moderniser. His own schooling is an important part of his political personality. He went to Kingham Hill School, a boarding school for disadvantaged children, and often speaks of his debt to it: ‘I owe more than I can possibly say, or ever ...”

“... piece by Paul Foot in 1986, is to know that he isn’t easily pinned down. Yet if there were laws against inciting party political hatred, Johnson would have been fined and marginalised as a red-baiter on many occasions in many countries: he is a reliable, aggressive anti-communist. Red is the colour that troubles him in Africa; skin colour, he would ...”

“... as, say, Milton Babbitt, nor, in the end, as convincing. The objective for both was to find laws which governed the combination of tones in a serial as opposed to tonal universe, and pertained only to that universe: which did not, like Schoenberg’s, allow for the possibility of what Boulez has always despised as a tonal-serial mish-mash, as when, in ...”

“... on fifty untouched islands in the Red Sea, which will be subject, officials say, to ‘independent laws and a regulatory framework developed and managed by a private committee’ – in other words, Sharia-lite codes. (Tellingly, when I met him in 2016, he recited a Saying of the Prophet prohibiting non-Muslim places of worship on the peninsula, not the ...”

“... Sr … lynched in Shreveport, Louisiana for allegedly writing a note to a white woman’; ‘David Walker, his wife and five children lynched in Hickman, Kentucky, in 1908 after Mr Walker was accused of using inappropriate language with a white woman.’ ‘Warren Powell, 14’, lynched in 1899 for ‘frightening’ a white girl. Henry Patterson for ...”

“... as for Who’s Who) in positions of power in publishing-houses; our true literary talents – David Jones, Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson and Geoffrey Hill – not forming a group, as they should, and in any case not read; and the food on British railways simply terrible (page 238: ‘Have you travelled on a British Railway? Gagged on its unthinkable ...”

“... as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet who could picture possible incest and a poisoning in The Bride of Abydos ...”