“... classes, and where such parties do exist they tend to act less as agents of government than, in David Lehmann’s words, ‘as employment agencies for their followers’. In their place are clientelist, sometimes even semi-feudal, oligarchies whose capacity for survival is remarkable. Despite the revolution of 1910-20, many of the Mexican élites are ...”

“... The moment was late in 1970, at the Travellers’ Club in London, during a supper for 14 people. David Brower, the saint of eco-sanity from the Sierra Club in California, had just given a sermon, a hell-fire variant of the one geologists have used for a century or more: rocks are long, life is short, who do we think we are? Brower’s homily – which the ...”

“... and reproductive capabilities of the communities that remained behind. Africa was transformed. David Livingstone is prominent among the figures credited with ending the slave trade. In fact, pressure for its abolition was already widespread and achieving results before he was born (in 1813) and it had been banned by the governments of the United States and ...”

“... when you set out to look the present in the eye but can’t quite bear the thought? Much of David Marquand’s powerful essay about ‘Britain, now’ is an elegy for a lost past, unsullied by ‘masterless capitalism’, a sad story of the light growing dim, good running to bad, the public realm hollowed out by vested interests, greed and unexamined ...”

“... tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the ...”

“... strangers at all’ – an accurate observation and an evocative one. But then, because privacy means privation, Fisher has to push it a step further: at the Robie House in Chicago, ‘The observer is mainly aware of an inner life that is self-contained and has no need of observers, visitors, or admirers, an inner life that is rich, mysterious, and ...”

“... the fact they spent most of his tenure in the White House trying to destroy him by fair means or foul, mainly foul. ‘Good ol’ Jesse,’ is all Clinton will say of the poisonous, racist Jesse Helms, who has just called him ‘unfit’ to lead the armed forces and warned him to stay away from North Carolina for his own safety. The newspaper ...”

“... presidency’ of the Vietnam years, all these authors believe the end justified the means. And none has any time for conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbor – 9/11, perhaps, has given new plausibility to the cock-up theory of intelligence operations. The major question for 1942 was whether there was any possibility of a cross-Channel attack on ...”

“... on a war they could not finish, or the recklessness of those who opposed a war they lacked the means to prevent. Blair’s political career has been marked by a determination to avoid all such risks. One of the ironies of Suez, and one of the contrasts it offers with Iraq, is that the risks taken were out of character for many of the leading players. The ...”

“... History of Australia, the indispensable one-volume condensation of his magnum opus, is a by no means atypical sentence: ‘The choir sang a Te Deum, which because of the terrible heat wafted fitfully around the arena; the flag of the new commonwealth was hoisted, and the artillery thundered and cheer after cheer ran around the great arena.’ You don’t ...”

“... lets drop the phrase ‘cryptogamic malady’, explaining to her friend that ‘cryptogamia’ means ‘concealed wedlock’. (The reader, of course, quietly makes the application to Florence and Emily themselves.) As for ‘Hermitage’, the name of a Rhône wine, this is a little joke of Florence and Emily’s own: they tell themselves that the chateau ...”

“... wife is suffering a nervous breakdown, nor why he receives messages from well-wishers like ‘the David and Jonathan Society, a newly-formed group of young, caring, Jewish faggots’. Joshua’s mother runs a massage parlour called Oral is Beautiful in Winnipeg which offers bilingual services. This is hardly enlightening. As baffling is the police interest in ...”

“... settle for being remembered for what was said to them as opposed to what they said themselves. David Livingstone went through hell before arriving at Lake Tanganyika in October 1871, but his stories about that journey would never enter the language the way Stanley’s would, when he caught up with him at Ujiji. Fourteen years earlier Livingstone had given ...”

“... poets, or on general topics related to allusion: there are pieces on A.E. Housman, Yvor Winters, David Ferry, plagiarism, metaphor and ‘Loneliness and Poetry’. Ricks has a fine ear, as he knows, and is happiest when demonstrating the unique resources and powers of poetry. His method is essentially evaluative, and it depends on precise ...”

“... of the church, the rise of intolerance, the spirit of the Crusades – blame it on Constantine. David Potter punctures this inflated image. This doesn’t mean he cuts Constantine down to size: far from it. Potter has done something far more difficult. He has examined, with gusto and an unrivalled mastery of detail, the aspects of Constantine neglected by ...”