“... On 25 May 1851 Dickens wrote no fewer than 11 letters – or perhaps it is better to say that 11 of those he wrote have survived. Several were only a line or two, declining an invitation to a public dinner at the Royal Literary Fund, thanking a theatre manager for the use of the stage for rehearsals of his amateur players, and the like ...”

“... appeasement. But their ‘privileged access’ to the British state was largely closed to them in May 1940 with ‘the final collapse of Chamberlain’s efforts to end the war’, as the authors inaccurately put it. Churchill disliked Scottish Conservatism, and the corporative-regionalist policies followed both by wartime and postwar governments had no place ...”

“... stupefied or browbeaten look of an abandoned croft-house ... Here was Unnimore.’ Here, too, was David Craig, groping through a wilderness in Morvern in search of a long-abandoned hamlet; his treasure-trove the remains of eight little houses, their stones covered with ‘whiskery grey lichens’. A hundred pages on, our intrepid explorer is being driven ...”

“... David McKitterick’s Printing and the Book Trade in Cambridge, 1534-1698 is the first of three projected volumes on the history of the book’s own publisher, the Cambridge University Press. Though the book stretches to 387 pages of text and almost another hundred pages of notes, it does not reach the point around 1700 when Richard Bentley reshaped the Press into a major player, as he tried to reshape Horace, Paradise Lost and Trinity College, where McKitterick is fellow and librarian ...”

“... We have defied the laws of arithmetic,’ declared a buoyant David Steel after he had heard the result of the Croydon, North-West by-election, ‘One plus one really does equal three.’ It is now apparent that the public opinion polls were consistently correct in showing that, while support for the Liberal Party as such remained of a traditionally modest order and support for the Social Democrats alone was a similar or even smaller percentage, backing for the two-party alliance as a third force in British politics was a wholly different matter, and promised the chance of a complete breakthrough under the existing electoral system ...”

“... was scrapped on 22 October; the vans were ‘not a good idea’, admitted an unapologetic Theresa May. But the government is going ahead with its plan to outsource immigration control to private citizens, despite a barrage of criticism and a Channel 4 FactCheck report finding no clear evidence that it would work. To have presented objective data about the ...”

“... fedora, he seemed freakishly straight – an American type not unlike William Burroughs or David Lynch. The film featured interviews with his older brother, Charles (who had killed himself by the time it was released), and his younger brother, Maxon. It also included Robert Hughes’s pronouncement that Crumb was a latter-day Bruegel. Crumb, who ...”

“... to recover from its association with a dominant imperialism, and not just in Latin America. David Stoll is another talented US academic, from a younger generation, specialising in Central America, and with a particular interest in Guatemala, about which he has written a couple of interesting, and indeed path-breaking books. Is Latin America Turning ...”

“... When​ David Graeber left academia in 2005, he had no intention of going back. His contract had been cancelled by Yale, supposedly after colleagues objected to his tardiness – though he suspected the real reason was that he had stood up for a student organiser whom the authorities wanted rid of. One of the brightest anthropologists of his generation, he scorned his peers on the way out ...”

“... we read on to find out. Perhaps we do know, so we read on to see if the killer will be caught. It may be that we know the culprit’s identity, and know they’ll be caught, but we read on to find out how, and why they did it. Or perhaps we know all these things, but, having been introduced to a set of characters, we stay to get to know them ...”

“... The Mirror is cracked and the images confused. It is part of the history of the British press, but may not much belong to its future. To a grammar-school boy growing up in the North of England forty years ago, the press was an honourable estate. At the centenary of the birth of C.P. Scott, The Making of the ‘Manchester Guardian’ was an ideal anthology for ...”

“... of historical detection on this scale from which they are not exempt. A fresh and inquisitive eye may on occasion observe something which those more familiar with a subject have missed, but where a highly complex topic, such as the history of the Knights Templar or of Christian origins, is got up for a specific purpose, with the research carried out, as it ...”

“... Eurosceptic ministers and former ministers, such as Iain Duncan Smith, Nigel Lawson and David Owen. Then there’s Grassroots Out, which was supposed to bring the other two lots together. But the prospectus on offer has been muddied because the spokesmen within each organisation have had different ideas. Johnson in particular changes his ideas once ...”

“... The publisher’s launching party for David Cannadine’s Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy in the Moses Room of the House of Lords on 22 October was the third occasion on which I had been inside that curious place since taking my seat as a hereditary member of it. The Moses Room is evidently so called because its walls depict, in tableaux more impressive for their size than their quality, the appropriate Old Testament scenes ...”

“... has been published by Granada publishers to capitalise on the success of the series. The author is David Mitchell, a writer not previously known in this field. His mission was to incorporate, not only the material used in the television series, but the numerous other interviews which the producers could not use. Granada’s publicity team add the quite false ...”