“... though 20th-century Conservatives have included a few Whiggish eccentrics. The Liberal Party of David Steel bears little resemblance to it, except in some residual link with religious dissent and the geographical periphery. The old-style Labour Party inherited some Whig nostrums, especially in foreign policy and constitutional matters. The Tory Party, on ...”

“... He was all for letting native peoples get on with their traditional lives. As it was, the Blues held power of life and death. One of Thesiger’s colleagues tried a murderer whose wife had taunted him in front of the other wives at the well; the reason for her fatal scorn was that she had undergone ‘the severe Pharaonic circumcision, which leaves only a ...”

“... house. We had an immediate sense that this was going to be something special, and knew that if we held the courage of our convictions, the media would respond to this exceptionally wonderful book. Hobsbawm Macaulay is not an amateur outfit – among their clients is Ken Follett. It is also the case that Walsh enjoys the services of one of the more ...”

“... home. There was a great deal here to whet the appetite of the Forsyte class. And the banks which held the rest of that class’s savings sought a decent return on their deposits, too. Moreover, they were well placed to play a large part in City life after the amalgamations of the 1890s, which threw up giants with large reserves like Barclays and the ...”

“... the lungs. While Patrick’s (unsuccessful) 1906 petition for a pardon was pending, the Society held a dinner, with demonstration, to which they invited the Governor of New York. The New York Mail reported, ‘the invitation does not specify whether the embalming and autopsy will take place before or after the dinner.’ The Society urged doctors and ...”

“... to the Indian population, though often through the efforts of Indian doctors and philanthropists. David Arnold’s book covers the early 19th century in greater detail and includes a chapter on the anguished responses to the first cholera pandemic of 1818-25. He provides fascinating material on the period when Europeans were trying to come to grips with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the homosexual artist, had converged to discuss painting and the human condition. The thought that David Sylvester and Francis Bacon were caught up in this dialogue seemed at once daunting and salutary to some of us then learning to paint in the same town. Their Interviews – first published in 1975 – conveyed such unassailable aplomb. ‘All art has now ...”

“... Nobel laureates Steven Weinberg and Kenneth Wilson, and their fellow physicists Jean Bricmont and David Mermin – with a selective group of the targets of their criticism: sociologists and social historians of science rather than, for example, literary or cultural studies theorists. The debate is joined also by a number of natural scientists and others who ...”

“... There wasn’t anything inevitable about David Cameron’s rise. If Kenneth Clarke had stirred himself into running something like a campaign when competing for the leadership with Iain Duncan Smith and been ready to appear more tractable on Europe; if David Davis had moved decisively in the immediate aftermath of Michael Howard’s resignation or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had not accepted it – if these or any number of other contingencies had been otherwise, Cameron might not have become leader ...”

“... which was the largest women’s prison in Western Europe at its closure in 2016, at first held 120 men and 27 women, as well as a number of boys over the age of eight. Men and women occupied separate wings and had separate tasks: women did the laundry and men and boys worked the treadwheel that supplied water to the prison (this was dangerous work ...”

“... dismantling of structures of political domination and social solidarity, feudal fetters which had held back the country’s capitalist progress and which, in locally different manifestations, continue to block capitalist rationalisation in many other European countries. First among the events that put West Germany on the path to what it would later become was ...”

“... recorded by the French-Mauritian chronicler Nicolas Mayeur in 1806 and reproduced in the late David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, called for gun flints, lead balls, gunpowder and river water to be mixed in an upturned shield with the point of a knife, the draught then taken with ginger soaked in the blood of the oath-takers. Mayeur, a retired slave ...”

“... I was ushered in to Colonel Klindt’s office. ‘I have come to request a visit to my husband, David Kitson,’ I said. ‘No visits for Kitson.’ He did not even look up. ‘Look –’ ‘It’s no good being difficult, lady,’ he said. ‘No visits for Kitson and that’s it. If you want to apply again tomorrow, well, that’s your affair. You can ...”

“... a number of books, long and short. Of these, the most distinguished is probably the shortest: David Fleeman’s Preliminary Handlist of Copies of Books Associated with Dr Samuel Johnson. Anyone with a bit of learning and a curious mind will find title after title to linger over in this tally of association copies. There is a second folio of Shakespeare ...”