“... them were some of the most noble families in the land. This theme is not entirely neglected in David Cannadine’s book – it inevitably rears its head on many occasions – but it does not form the main focus of his interest. This is a pity, for there can be few historians equally familiar with both the general social history and the particular details ...”

“... at once. Perhaps it’s just the best we can do. Perhaps we should have stuck to philosophy.Caspar David Friedrich is a possible exception. Born in 1774 in Greifswald on the Baltic coast, he studied painting in Copenhagen and in 1798 moved to Dresden, the so-called or self-styled ‘Florence on the Elbe’, where he died in 1840. A major retrospective of his ...”

“... I’ve been having these bad dreams about David Plante recently. Sometimes, I am slumped on the lavatory, glued there by gin and self-pity; sometimes, I am watching The Sound of Music on television and bawling shameful tears; sometimes, I am driving bad-temperedly through the Tuscan countryside, railing foolishly at the world’s treatment of me ...”

“... over trenches, barbed-wire and shell-torn territory to kill and capture large numbers of Germans. David Omissi remarks on the accuracy with which Jemadar Shah Mirza (a jemadar was a junior NCO) describes the action and its short-term consequences for the enemy; as usual no general breakthrough was achieved. Letters of this date and from these regiments are ...”

“... most ironic, the only one that was allowed to laugh. Down at the shops, they tell me the film is David Copperfield, and the guy with the big collar is famous, he plays the lead in one of the big American sitcoms. They do not know the name of the character he plays, but this is fine, because I have not read the book either (though I might remember it from a ...”

“... known for the Watchmen comics, explained that the idea belonged to his co-author and illustrator David Lloyd. ‘We shouldn’t burn the chap every November 5th,’ Lloyd wrote to Moore, ‘but celebrate his attempt to blow up Parliament!’ Moore says two thoughts occurred to him when he read this. ‘Dave was obviously a lot less sane than I hitherto ...”

“... of a (botched) dream of fatherhood into The available space, I had read the kids the opening of David Copperfield – the terrible Murdstone chapters – And Ruby had exited after a page or so, going along the landing to say to her stepmother, White-faced but calm, frightened, considerate, as if taking pity on my mistake, ‘I think I am too young to hear ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”