“... as they were supposed to. Over Palestine/Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, for example, Britain held intelligence back from the Americans because the two countries were ‘at loggerheads’. There were frequent personality clashes, the most serious of them in the 1980s between Peter Marychurch of GCHQ and Bill Odom of NSA, who regarded Marychurch as a ...”

“... of royal privileges, seemed to degrade the nobility of literature and ideas. This was the view held, for instance, by Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, antiquarian, forger, embezzler and (as Johns writes) a ‘self-deluding impostor of extraordinary proportions’. Brydges spent much of his life composing unremarkable sonnets (about 2000 a year as he got ...”

“... which is where you’ll be shopping if you decide to follow your dream of becoming the next David Foster Wallace – who did have to work, incidentally, like the rest of us. (At Pomona College, Foster Wallace’s ‘Prose Fiction’ class consisted entirely of getting students to read mass-market bestsellers.) Why are there no great novelists any ...”

“... has come to a head faster than expected as a result of the Scottish independence referendum and David Cameron’s political ambition. Labour has (or had) an electoral interest in keeping Scotland in the Union. The Conservatives do not. Their loyalty to the United Kingdom is sentimental, not electoral. The practical argument against Scottish independence was ...”

“... what amounted to pocket money. (He did better in this respect than the feeble-minded Mr Dick of David Copperfield, who is supplied with pocket money but not allowed to spend it.) Not long after becoming third earl, he fled from home for a brief period in the company of his Swiss valet, though whether this was an abduction or an elopement is hard to say. The ...”

“... prince, has been slipping. The woman modern scholarship gives us has been neatly summed up by David Cannadine: ‘A workaday regnant queen, shorn of her glitter and her gold, her glamour and her greatness, with a false face, a disturbed psyche, a heart of stone, a barren womb and feet of clay; and as such a woman trying to do a man’s job, but not always ...”

“... two of her ‘Japanese’ prints in an episode of the TV show Civilisations, while in a later one David Olusoga brought In the Loge to his argument. A print from 1896 In Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1877-78) a girl of perhaps six or seven half-sits, half-lies, in large armchair. She looks as if she has originally been posed, in a white lacy dress with ...”

“... MI5 were loyal to Westminster. The SAS had its own aggressive tactics. None of these services was held accountable as rivalry deepened and the number of agents and informers proliferated. They found it relatively easy to infiltrate the IRA at first, in part because of its unified structure and lack of discipline. I’ve been told that bomb-makers couldn’t ...”

“... in the late 1960s, are no longer central to his achievement. Cutting It Short isn’t the David Lodge novel that its English title seems to promise; indeed, one of the things that is to be docked – twice, and excruciatingly – by the heroine, who happens to be Hrabal’s mother, Marie, is the tail of a dog. This was the 1920s, and suddenly ...”

“... were dead or in Angolan jails, while South Africa’s military incursions were at least held in check. Various irregulares had hidden themselves here and there, including harried remnants of the Portuguese-armed Unita on the High Plateau, and points east through Bié to the plains of Moxico and the Zambian frontier. But these would be able to ...”

“... military presence in Nato; John Young’s reassessment of British attitudes to European union; David Reynolds on the sharply different views of the post-1945 strategic pattern held by Attlee and Bevin, and the clash of the British chiefs of staff (already looking on Russia as the new enemy) first with the Foreign Office ...”

“... the 17th century that would challenge what she and her friends saw as the Tory version supplied by David Hume. The first volume was an immediate bestseller when it appeared in 1763, and so to a lesser extent were its four successors which were all published before 1773. Insisting on and obtaining what was then the quite extraordinary sum of £1000 per ...”

“... trouble in accepting the working classes as partners in running the country, from his co-option of David Kirkwood to help organise Labour in the First World War to his virtual delegation of labour relations to Ernest Bevin in the Second. His birth, background and personality made him far less sensitive to social nuances than most of his political ...”

“... 17th century the same international concerns produced the Evangelical Union, the eirenicism of David Pareus, and the disastrous attempt, which provoked the Thirty Years War, to annex Bohemia for the reformed cause. In the next generation they produced the globe-trotting ecumenical initiatives of Dury and Comenius. Those themes, rich and richly ...”

“... caused the British, sickened by such Jewish terrorism as Menachem Begin directed against the King David Hotel and alarmed by the danger of a revival of anti-semitism, to throw in their hand. The result was chaos. Professor Louis describes America displaying herself at her worst and in response Britain doing likewise; both showed scant regard for the ...”