“... of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d be sick. Whose United Kingdom? Theirs. The Eton Mess and their cronies. Big Business. Neocons. The warmongers. Not ours. We left Edinburgh at ...”

“... of cool and careful thought as well as full information about the nuclear issue and its origins. David Holloway explains that ‘the central theme of this book is the development of Soviet nuclear weapons.’ He has ‘tried to provide a coherent – though inevitably incomplete and provisional – analysis of Stalin’s nuclear policy’ in terms of ...”

“... waiters, until it becomes their proper nature. It is the same with writers and artists. Byron or David or Robert Lowell cannot slink off and become their ordinary selves in the intervals of being poets and painters and men of the age. Greta Garbo is always Greta Garbo, once she has found the part. But there is quite a different category of actor, as of ...”

“... explorers seems to have become a popular pastime. In recent years, Oliver Ransford has diagnosed David Livingstone as a manic depressive, Dennis Rawlins has discredited Robert Peary’s claim to the North Pole, and William McKinlay has proved that Vihjalmur Stefansson was a selfish cad. Debunking probably was inevitable. These men were all of the heroic age ...”

“... the Final Solution was intentionally such that very few records of essential decisions were kept; David Irving may even be formally right in his assertion that there is no written document to link Hitler himself with the Final Solution until October 1943; and the same absence or confusion in the written record has even been taken as evidence that the whole ...”

“... has it, was brought to him mid-set). ‘At the peak of its popularity in the 16th century,’ David Berry writes in his history of tennis, ‘Paris alone had 250 courts, including one at the Louvre and another at Versailles, the latter of which was occupied in the revolution of 1789 by the Third Estate as a symbolic protest at the elitist nature of this ...”

“... assayer in the United States Mint in Philadelphia. Stock points out that in the 1890s the young Ezra ‘mixed with the assayers and drank in stories about “gold bricks”, which he still remembered in 1944 when he wrote his pamphlet on the “Economic Nature of the United States”’. Pound was still alive when Stock was writing, and assisted ...”

“... Motivation is attenuated or omitted. In ‘Preparation for a Collie’, for instance, a young family seems resolved to dispose of their dog, for no particular reason except to ‘simplify their life’. The boy, David, of kindergarten age, can hardly share this hope but makes no plea in the animal’s ...”

“... permitting the more enlightened reformist policies which culminated in the 1933 Children and Young Persons Act. As Pearson points out, the proportion of young offenders receiving custodial sentences is much higher in the Eighties than it was in the Thirties. Indeed, the whole system of criminal justice is now more ...”

“... had supposed, and in many ways this biography feels like a return to that project. The quiet young actress who kept Dickens company in the last years of his life here becomes the most important person he knew. Dickens met her and, as Tomalin imagines it, ‘the wing of a butterfly flapped, and a whole weather system was unsettled.’ The self he had ...”

“... my driver the finger and yelling ‘Wank-eeeer!’ in a thick Brummie accent. The reason for that young man’s presence in Kabul and for the similar journeys so many others have made has become the subject of a prolonged, charged and still unresolved political debate. But the fact that more British Muslims are fighting for Islamic State than for the British ...”

“... of Wales had her own court at Ludlow Castle, and went on her own mini-royal progresses. She was a young teenager before she became aware of the threat to her mother’s marriage and to her own position; but after 1533, aged 17, she could not avoid isolation and humiliation. In 1536 she was declared illegitimate since Katherine’s marriage was declared never ...”

“... world of his childhood destroyed, and was never again able to find a place in which to belong. As David Cesarani puts it in the closing lines of this monumental (it is the only word) biography, for Koestler ‘home represented the secure bourgeois domesticity swept away by the Great War; home was a country that rejected him and connived in the slaughter of ...”

“... Europe, would come to the Zam Zam, sometimes for the martinis but usually to be thrown out. When David Letterman came to town to do a week of shows his advance people phoned Bruno to see if he would throw Letterman out of the bar on the show. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you,’ Bruno said over the phone. ‘Who’s ...”

“... its Parliamentary staff, one of its political correspondents, and its Parliamentary sketch-writer David McKie. Frank Johnson, restored to the back page of the Times after a disappointing sojourn abroad, and Edward Pearce of the Daily Telegraph, are representative of the sketch-writing-as-entertainment school. McKie is more thoughtful. The political team on ...”