“... on his entitlement to privacy and on his right to freedom of expression. He lost. The High Court held that he had no reasonable expectation of privacy since blogging is essentially a public activity, and that in any event the public interest in knowing that it was a policeman who was excoriating politicians and the police service outweighed any privacy ...”

“... like: he had never seen it, only heard his father’s stories. After a pogrom in which Cossacks held a pistol to his head and ransacked the family home, my great-grandfather left Mostyska. He started training as a cantor in Grosswardein (now Oradea in Romania) but the First World War disrupted his studies and after reluctant service in the Imperial Army he ...”

“... her face.’ The cruel precision of this figure reflects not so much Clark’s brutality as widely-held attitudes about the market value of female beauty and the implicit contrast with the value of women’s intelligence and art. Stafford explored this paradox in the harrowing short story she wrote about the accident. Awaiting the surgeon whose scalpel will ...”

“... for works by artists as different from each other as P.D. James, DV8 Physical Dance Theatre and David Lynch. Stephen Egger, an American academic and former policeman who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on the phenomenon, gives a definition/description of serial murder in Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon: A serial murder occurs when one or more ...”

“... But his development of this appeal to recent history does not turn out very happily. He cites David Marquand as an influential exponent of the view that Britain’s cultural conservatism in the 20th century was the result of an ossification of the values of liberal capitalist individualism which had served their turn and had had their day. ‘Such a view ...”

“... he was writing a history of theory, partly because the painters did not correspond to the theory. David Solkin’s Painting for Money returns the painters to the story. Hogarth is here as well as other anti-civic humanist painters, and there is even a spokesman for the opposition to Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville. But Mandeville is presented as an isolated ...”

“... good Opinion her Passion has made her conceive of him’); Sarah Fielding’s deeply unpleasant David Simple (1744), in which characters with names like Spatter, Lady Know-All and Mr Varnish assail the gormless hero until he drops dead of despair; and Sarah Scott’s thoroughly demoralising Millenium Hall (1762), on the supposed consolations of living in a ...”

“... in 1650 was marked by Royal Oak Day – 29 May. By drawing profusely on churchwardens’ accounts, David Cressy attempts to illustrate the relative impact of these occasions – though it is not always clear what, if anything, can be concluded from differences in payments. Such difficulties are not overcome by the author’s tendency to slip into ...”

“... but esoteric science. The part of Bill Clinton is here played by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist David Baltimore and the junior female colleague is not Monica Lewinsky but a Japanese-Brazilian-American immunologist named Thereza Imanishi-Kari. Their relations are not sexual but wholly collegial. The out-of-control independent counsel is not Kenneth Starr but ...”

“... out of line. Enter Muhammad Ali, who over the next few years was to change the face of boxing. David Remnick’s book in fact concentrates on the two astonishing fights Ali had with Liston (Ali won the title in the first and defended it successfully in the second), and on the relationship between Ali, Liston and Patterson. For Remnick, as for most ...”

“... to ‘heirs whatsoever’; at another, he knelt alone on the ruins of the old Auchinleck castle, held a stone in his hands and swore that if the place passed to the wrongful heir, ‘this stone should swim in his heart’s blood.’ One doesn’t usually associate the suave Bozzy with the language of the Border ballads, or with the attitudes he recorded with ...”

“... and populares, has not used his life of Pompey to carry the process further. No one could accuse David Stockton’s The Gracchi of a similar failure to discuss evidence and problems. It begins by setting out the basic workings of the Republican constitution, and continues with a (rather brief) examination of the literary sources. There follows a sober survey ...”

“... In Vienna’s small world I had no idea that scientists of the calibre of J.D. Bernal, W.L. Bragg, David Keilin and Dorothy Hodgkin existed: how then could I have even tried to emulate them? It was Cambridge that made me, not Vienna. The longest chapter in Medawar’s book concerns scientific life and manners. I like his admonition not to regard manual work as ...”

“... reconstructs sexual norms from the actions – and the fates – of a few hundred deviants, David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch base their generalisations about the Tuscans and their families on one magnificent document, the Florentine property tax of 1427, which was based on a house-to-house survey of about a quarter of a million people. A typical ...”

“... In fact, I believe that few of Barbara’s colleagues, in any wing of the party, would have held that view. She shows herself to be very jealous of Shirley Williams, and in particular of Shirley’s success with the media, by whom she always felt herself battered. One can understand her resentment of the fact that of the two nicest people in ...”