“... the victim of Mammon and the casualty of market forces. In the days when the Church still held an entrenched place in the fabric of British society, the responsibility for publishing its own biennial Who’s Who was one that rested proudly with the nation’s premier academic publishing-house, the Oxford University Press. Gradually, however, this ...”

“... away from the eyes of the international community. The ‘autonomy’ envisaged by the Camp David agreements is unlikely to extend beyond garbage collection. Ostensibly Two Minutes over Baghdad is a True Life Adventure Story in the ‘Entebbe’ tradition, in which an author trades his skills as a publicist against ‘inside’ information supplied by ...”

“... invention filled the political vacuum, at least in England. A regency was rejected; James was held to have abdicated; and the infant James, who should have succeeded his father, was passed over for the crown, on the specious pretence that the baby was a pretender, smuggled into the queen’s apartments in a warming pan. The crown passed instead to William ...”

“... and fleeting, an imposition from without, no sooner bestowed than withdrawn. Take the case of David Hume. In the dark days of logical (sic) positivism Hume’s reputation ran high as the philosopher who first did away with causal necessity; he was thought to have shown that causation consists in nothing, objectively, but constant conjunction: things ...”

“... young woman”, whereas a lady in her thirties could easily do so’. Authors cannot be held to blame for the boasts of their blurbs. Still, the claim that the professor’s is ‘the first comprehensive critical biography of Jane Austen for half a century’ is presumably licensed by his remark that the ‘last’ detailed critical biography dates ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... birth falls on 7 February 2012, and Dickensians across the globe are stirring. Dickens, who held strong opinions about virtually everything, had his own view of such occasions. Michael Slater notes his ‘embarrassment’ and ‘irritation’ at the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1864: always for Dickens the best way for a writer or any other ...”

“... Leo Amery’s Birmingham, sixty years or so later, empire did not mean a great deal, to judge by David Cannadine’s memoir of his not very imperial childhood which he appends to his new book. Cannadine’s aim is to answer P.D. Morgan’s challenge to envisage the empire as ‘an entire interactive system, one vast interconnected world’. This requires a ...”

“... nexus, in favour of Spartan purity. The unlikely father of the ‘white cube effect’ was Casper David Friedrich, whose studio’s one ornament was a T-square dangling from the wall, a reminder of honest German craftsmanship in keeping with his penchant for woodwork and frame-design. Of course, Friedrich’s brand of mystical pietism was partly responsible ...”

“... was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.After leaving Satya, she moved into a flatshare with Armstrong in Boston. Her luminous ...”

“... number of survivors miraculously trickled back to England. Among them were the ship’s captain, David Cheap; his second-in-command, Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling ...”

“... not simply to pass on his sympathies. On 14 February 2017, when Comey still had his job, Trump held a meeting with him in the White House to try to persuade him to drop the FBI investigation into Michael Flynn, who had resigned the day before from his post as national security adviser. Flynn quit following the exposure of his contacts with Ambassador ...”

“... be a widow in the next.’ It is a warning that has too often been ignored – and not only by the David Jenkinses and the Spacely-Trellises of today’s Ecclesia Anglicana. For they, too, of course, had their predecessors. The Bishop of London who declared at the outbreak of war in 1914, ‘This is the greatest fight ever made for the Christian Religion – a ...”

“... timber than has occupied England’s throne in many decades’ – courtiers and royal-watchers held their breath to see if ‘Bertie’ would make out. In fact, the responsibility thrust upon him brought out unsuspected qualities in George VI, and the institution emerged from the trial stronger in public affection than ever before. The crisis exemplifies ...”

“... exactly the way a person was supposed to be in 1964. Thin as a leaf, a Biba size eight, hips that held hipsters perfectly in place, and legs that were perfectly designed for emerging from skirts that were little more than a pelmet. But – oh what a waste of temporary good fortune – none of that mattered. My 17th birthday present was a haircut at ...”