“... it would appear, among Western countries, to be least true of the United Kingdom.’ The second is David Donnison, in his The Politics of Poverty. It was published in 1982, but the remark I wish to quote is about the year 1978: ‘Labour had lost its convictions about poverty and the redistribution of incomes. Or perhaps the voters at large had lost those ...”

“... of how formless the history of an institution becomes once its public procedures are meddled with. Fairer, more decent and catering to the individual the new system may be but as memorable and even ceremonial, no and that is a loss, though these days not an uncommon one. The school is not fee-paying, a grammar school such as Leeds Grammar School or Manchester ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A.P. Herbert recorded that. And it was ...”

“... the operation that remained, there was almost no first-hand reporting. One freelance journalist, David Divine, made three trips in a small boat that was rescuing British troops, and the Royal Navy took a Pathé newsreel reporter-cum-cameraman; otherwise the BBC (and British newspapers) relied on the Ministry of Information. The consequences were a mixture of ...”

“... modern Germany, much as Thatcherism once did in the UK. Supporters of Agenda 2010, who are given a fairer hearing by Hassel and Schiller than by Nachtwey, claim that it turned Germany around. Unlike anywhere else in Europe, unemployment in Germany has fallen almost continuously since 2005. The long-term unemployment rate, which once stood at 6 per cent, is now ...”

“... on which they built a thirteen-room house called the Dell, where Austin, Mabel and her husband, David, established what seems to have been a largely harmonious ménage à trois. Mabel, much to her chagrin, never managed to meet the elusive poet face to face, although she claimed Dickinson enjoyed hearing her play the piano, and received from her a number of ...”

“... Many readers will sense something odd about such reliance on a vision predating not only David Hume and Adam Smith, but Darwin, Freud, Marx and Durkheim, from an age when genes and the structure of human DNA were undreamt of. Can philosophy really be so timeless? The answer is plainly yes, provided a sufficiently passionate sermon can be extracted ...”

“... Coast, Ghana, Nigeria or Kenya?’ Like many liberal policy men in Europe – from Paul Collier to David Miliband – Smith locates the tragedy of the migration ‘crisis’ in the drowning out of legitimate asylum requests by the false claims of ‘economic migrants’. The term ‘economic refugee’ originated in Europe in the 1950s. It was first applied to ...”

“... a monarch’s title, but exists only to represent benign authority, order and justice, the kinder, fairer authority that existed before he went away, naively leaving the sheriff to govern in his name and pervert his wishes, the same authority he will restore when he returns. The other is Robin Hood, who defies the system, who stands up for the little ...”

“... an unworthy consideration: suggesting that critics of the proposals despise such things, as David Willetts did when discussing my LRB piece on the Browne Report (4 November 2010) in a speech at the British Academy, is just a way of setting up easily knocked-down straw opponents. It is, rather, that the model of the student as consumer is inimical to the ...”

“... tax. But it isn’t clear how she will survive in the meantime. ‘I think there should be a fairer way of asking people to leave their accommodation,’ she said. Council tenants face a jail sentence if they try to sublet. I asked Quinn if a relative could move in so as to avoid the bedroom tax. ‘That defeats the purpose of having a second ...”

“... extremely popular. And if political correctness is seen as strongly bound to Labour, the Lib Dems, David Cameron, the EU, the BBC, the Guardian and, in Grimsby, Melanie Onn, the movement against it is strongly connected to Ukip, Jeremy Clarkson, the Daily Mail and, in Grimsby, Austin Mitchell.Before he stood aside, there was speculation Mitchell would be the ...”

“... a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of ...”

“... was generating abroad made its work that much more difficult. The PA felt snubbed when in 2009 David Miliband came to the theatre without consulting them. A perception arose that the theatre was rich, though its operating annual budget never exceeded $450,000 dollars, modest for an organisation of its size. Juliano had never handed out money, but he had ...”