“... decline of titular aristocrats, only occasionally taking in the untitled ‘patricians’. The David who mortally wounded this Goliath was Lloyd George. He was determined to deprive the landlords of both power and wealth – and he partly succeeded. The small squirearchy were for the most part financially and politically wiped out by the 1920s. The ...”

“... and moving, but symbolic of a whole order of events, a fundamental shift in social values. David Leavitt has praised the book for this ‘historical largeness’, for telling ‘the story of the Seventies and Eighties in America’: the story, in other words, of the unmaking of the traditional family, with its gender and generational roles, its ...”

“... from Downing College.) Warner had a hand in Powys’s rise to fame, having recommended him to David Garnett, another fantasist, whose Lady into Fox had been a great success in 1922. There seems to have been a market in those years for a peculiarly English brand of fantasy, but any imputation of parochialism must fail: Garnett was a man of wide ...”

“... of readability and excitement. The essays, mostly for the 17th century, edited by Peter Clark and David Souden are not all new work They include an important reprinted article on age-specific mobility in England by Roger Schofield, the well-known study of Cardington in the 1780s. They also include an article of Peter Clark’s from 1979. The value of the book ...”

“... the closet. This time, however, there was no formal disbandment and since the mid-Eighties, when David Duke organised his spin-off Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, embittered white Southerners have kept in trim by linking up with one or another of America’s numerous neo-Nazi militia movements. The Twenties obsession with Catholics has again been sidelined. The ...”

“... who wanted me to read verses at a little morning session for foreign poets. ‘Oh, please, Mr David. We only have one Frenchman so far.’ Foolishly I agreed to pipe up if she really ran short of European versifiers. By Easter Sunday we were enjoying an ideal English summer, blue skies and cool breeze. We were feasted, Arab poems were beautifully ...”

“... used to say. The new version is ‘Zimbabwe is kenge,’ which means roughly the same thing. David Caute’s portrait of white mores is savage, but like so many visitors before and after him, he was fascinated – seduced – by Rhodesia. It was, and is, a country which captivates even as it appals, and it has always been so much easier to explain the ...”

“... and 1685, and in 1700 Solomon de Medina became the first Jew to receive an English knighthood. In David Katz’s words, ‘once Cromwell and Charles II realised that the Jews as a nation could never be admitted through the front door, they were anxious to go round the back themselves and let them in through the door reserved for tradesmen.’ How do we ...”

“... people trying to ‘adopt’ Coe. Television viewers can see the process at work in the person of David Coleman, who maintains, on camera, what comes across as a flirtatiously bantering relationship with ‘Seb’. Coe may be inured to it by now, but as his book records, he has been embarrassed in the past: ‘To cap it all, [Frank] Bough had signed off the ...”

“... court of Lorraine, at Lunéville. She was fat, looking in her portrait by Tocqué a little like David Hume (her friends called her ‘La Grosse’); also hopelessly disorganised, full of neurasthenic aches and pains, and a great groaner and complainer – but this last somehow in a companionable fashion, showing she was as interested in ...”

“... and family life, on which the settlement’s ‘blueprint for growth’ was premised. By contrast, David Neal’s monograph opens with a successful legal action brought by a convict couple against one of the First Fleet captains. Neal is concerned to show how the establishment of the rule of law in a penal colony, at once a tautology and an oxymoron, created ...”

“... interviews based on an essay in the New Statesman. Blair’s retainers dutifully lauded the essay: David Miliband, the king over the water, described it as a masterclass in political argument. In fact, the piece is an embarrassment, a mixture of reheated Blairite cliché, regurgitated Silicon Valley TED talks, and analysis of the British cultural landscape as ...”

“... in the popular iconography of American freedom, alongside comic-book heroes in capes and tights. David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, a federalist president who failed to secure re-election, has sold two million copies since it was published in 2001. For all its sentimental and antiquarian dimensions, the cult of the founders has damaging political ...”

“... fundamental right. Recently, I have heard them voice similar views about the jailing in Austria of David Irving – the man who prided himself on having shaken more hands that shook hands with Hitler than anyone else in the world – for Holocaust denial. It seems that racists and Nazis are never far from the centre of concerns about free speech. In the ...”

“... David Peace’s first novel, Nineteen Seventy Four (1999), was set in West Yorkshire in the year of its title, and presented that time and place in apocalyptic terms. ‘These are violent bloody times, son,’ a senior policeman tells the narrator, a gauche young journalist investigating the disappearance of a series of girls ...”