“... to extend British airstrikes against Islamic State from Iraq to Syria began in November when David Cameron set out his case to Parliament in relatively decorous terms. By 2 December, when Parliament voted in favour, an older, cruder performance had emerged. One of the prime minister’s enactments back in November was the voice that accompanies TV ...”

“... a protectionist southern Toryism, Hazeldine suggests, the region – especially Birmingham – was held back by its reluctance to give up smaller-scale artisanal manufacture, before being nudged from Liberalism into a more southern-aligned Unionism by the ‘charisma and political machine’ of Joseph Chamberlain. The North emerges as the product not only of ...”

“... under his command was surrounded in 1942, subsequently recruited large numbers of Soviet soldiers held in POW camps in Germany for his projected Russian Liberation Army, which the Germans supported in principle, though in the event they denied it any real military role until very late in the war. The Vlasov movement, which attracted some first-wave émigrés ...”

“... how carefully Lawrence refuses to recognise virtue in anyone but himself’), and his sponsor David Pryce-Jones now finds F.R. Leavis much the same, so it may be legitimate to cite the famous excoriation of Bloomsbury that was voiced by Lawrence and amplified by Leavis: ‘they talked endlessly, but endlessly – and never, never a good thing said. They ...”

“... by setting about it with the enthusiasm of crusaders clearing the infidel from Jerusalem. David Herlihy of Harvard derided it as ‘a silly book, founded on faulty method and propounding a preposterous thesis’, while Lawrence Stone thought it advanced ‘an implausible hypothesis based on a far-fetched connection with one still uproven fact of ...”

“... Africa and Asia don’t seem quite as bad. The perplexingly affirmative work of Niall Ferguson and David Armitage scants, if it doesn’t actually trivialise, the suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its victims. More is said now about the modernising advantages the empires brought, and about the security and order they maintained. There is far ...”

“... After. That work made nonsense of the notion, fostered by Israel’s dynamic first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and his acolytes, that ‘Israel’s leaders sought desperately to make peace with one or all of the Arab states but the Arabs, hell-bent on the destruction of Israel, turned down these overtures and repaid this goodwill with continued ...”

“... of Empire by Philip Morgan. But broadly speaking, the radical historians of Empire – David Killingray, Peter Sluglett, Nicholas Tarling – have been confined to the final, historiographical volume, while the more conservative have been given the meaty chapters in the bulk of the History. The purpose of the Historiography volume is to trace ...”

“... not because she cheated on her husband, but because the man she really loved, a rake called David Tyler, did not love her back, and so she failed in exactly the same way as the man she settled for. These are the subtleties Brookner deals in, painful, tender and life-shaping, and at her best she choreographs them with the power of implication that we ...”

“... written and of a balls-aching boredom.’ In 1960 he found something he did like. He announced to David Selznick that ‘a delightful book’ called To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was ‘going to be a great success’. He himself, he wrote, was the model for the character Dill, being a childhood friend of the author’s. The first letter in Too Brief a ...”

“... powers – ‘one of the worst and one of the most influential ideas around’, in the opinion of David Starkey in 2019. Hobbes describes it in Leviathan as ‘a doctrine, plainly, and directly against the essence of a Common-wealth … That the sovereign power may be divided. For what is it to divide the Power of a Common-wealth but to Dissolve it? For ...”

“... sober facts (dates, names of ships, transcripts of Congressional hearings) and indignant feelings. Held in a solution of facts, the feelings were never precipitated into sentimentality: but The Other Occupant has no such protection. Its pathos does not convince, because it is rendered with self-indulgence and a writer’s self-regard. The change from A Lesser ...”

“... strange picture-postcards. They show scenes such as that of six men, heavily veiled, veils held down by brimmed hats, posed with long-barrelled rifles. And two men in grass skirts, with feathers in their hair, intent on a game of billiards. They are Africans. And here are twenty-odd white men, in straw boaters, surrounding a prone ...”

“... Despite being (allegedly) pushed into an Amsterdam canal by her husband in a honeymoon quarrel she held him a besotted slave and relieved him of large sums on the pretext of planning to make films of his books. The tales that she charged him £5000 for sewing on a button and £10,000 for cutting his hair need not be taken too seriously, but the domestic ...”

“... one. Except in T’ang China, that sensible civilisation, the profession of arms has always been held in honour. Despite evidence to the contrary, the soldier is still regarded as one of nature’s gentlemen. War is one of the few bonds that can cement class solidarity. The pacific hero of one of L.P. Hartley’s novels is astounded to be told by his ...”