“... of character and the assessment of anecdotal evidence.) There is an accessible biography in print, David Nokes’s excellent Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed (1985), but this was written with an eye on the student (and teacher), rather than the non-academic reader whom Glendinning has in mind. Nokes, subtitling his book ‘A Critical Biography’, felt ...”

“... be the husband of Anne Frank in E.I. Lonoff’s sanctum sanctorum, to proclaiming himself a vice king, at one with the polluted, as publisher of Lickety Split. Like a good modernist writer, Zuckerman the pornographer imagines at last the least likely way to dramatise the serious lesson taught him by the chastening ordeal of unhallowed existence.I realise ...”

“... early response. It was used by government experts in media appearances: notoriously by David Halpern, head of the Behavioural Insights Team (aka the ‘Nudge Unit’), in a BBC News interview, but also by Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser. As late as 13 March, he told Radio 4 that one of the ‘key things we need to do ...”

“... you very much,’ Armstrong said. ‘We know this will be a good flight.’ The commentary of Jack King, Nasa’s public affairs officer, accompanied the countdown. ‘Three minutes and twenty-five seconds and counting, and we are still Go at this time.’ The rocket disappeared into the sky, and David Brinkley of CBS spoke ...”

“... words for the times by 1 February, a fortnight after big riots in Naples and Palermo had forced King Ferdinand II to concede a constitution. ‘Clearly foreshortened and written in haste,’ is the verdict of David McLellan, the editor of the 1998 World’s Classics edition of the Manifesto, to which Attali adds only that ...”

“... nor being ignored dented the incurable boastfulness of newspapers and their proprietors. Cecil King, Northcliffe’s nephew and then director of the Daily Mirror, claimed that it was the Mirror which had provided the real opposition during the war. ‘The result was the Labour landslide in 1945 to which Messrs Attlee, Bevin and Co had contributed ...”

“... shantymen on the trading ships that had made the likes of Mr Podsnap wealthy. Oh, Louis was the King of France before the Revolution Away, haul away, we’ll haul away, Joe But Louis got his head cut off, which spoiled his constitution Away, haul away, we’ll haul away, Joe. It’s therefore worth being cautious about proposed constitutions, whether for ...”

“... on him. The front cover of Tynan’s Letters, published in 1994, features a portrait taken by David Bailey, itself a sign of pop status. The front cover of The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan is a close up of its subject inhaling, eyes shut, fingers splayed; its back cover, three shots of him in different stages of smoking – an action-sequence of sorts. How ...”

“... In​ the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it’s mainly Hockney’s own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership ...”

“... realised that the only way his opposition men could form a stable government was by forcing the king to accept contentious policies at the outset. He made Catholic Emancipation, and eventually parliamentary reform, the price of taking office. Otherwise, he insisted, he would stay in Northumberland. This stance kept him out of government until 1830 and ...”

“... memories of 6 January were at any risk of fading, they were rekindled on 28 October, when David DePape attacked Paul Pelosi, husband of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer after breaking into their home in San Francisco (she subsequently announced she was standing down as Speaker). DePape shook Pelosi awake with cries of ‘Where’s ...”

“... policy adviser on the NHS, Penny Dash, went on to join McKinsey, and a McKinsey senior partner, David Bennett, became Blair’s chief policy adviser, and later the chief executive of Monitor, the NHS regulator. The revolving door between McKinsey, regulators, policymakers and businesses is a consistent feature of the consulting businesses.Bogdanich and ...”

“... at having connived at his father’s arrest for treason in Nahum Tate’s 1681 acting version of King Lear, Regan whispers to him: ‘The Grotto, Sir, within the lower Grove,/Has Privacy to suit a Mourner’s Thought.’ The next scene duly opens on ‘A Grotto’, where we find ‘Edmund and Regan amorously Seated, Listning to Musick’. But ...”

“... the defence of the Scottsboro boys, and when she died, in 1967, her estate went to Martin Luther King and, after his death, to the NAACP.Crowther admires the fact that, in the midst of all this, Parker repeatedly ‘dissected her own privilege’. ‘Soldiers of the Republic’, for example, begins with the narrator welling up at the sight of a Spanish baby ...”

“... years. Very good entries on Law (Ross Cranston), Culture (Richard White) and on K.R. Murdoch (David Bowman) are exceptions to the general level. Even granting their own terms – those of closed and authoritative, rather than open and provisional history – the Dictionary and chronology could be much more imaginative; on a reprinting, they should be ...”