“... recruiters: a town planner with Islington Council and a Canadian convert who worked for J.P. Morgan. Soon he abandoned Brother Falik and the YMO. The recruiters gave him literature by Nabhani and repeated the movement’s key words to him: ‘ideas, intellect, thought, challenge, systems, concepts, destruction, construction’. Once they were persuaded ...”

“... readers and collects the work of many translators who use a variety of techniques (Edwin Morgan translates Mayakovsky into Scots: ‘Een/gawp oot/fae a sonsy bap-face’). Political poems, manifestos and lectures that are usually ignored in the West are included here. The result is a fuller view of the poet struggling to reconcile his gift with his ...”

“... from recent prods to produce work of greater scope. In The History Manifesto (2014), Jo Guldi and David Armitage worry that the production of scholarly miniatures disqualifies historians from contributing to urgent cultural and political discussions – about climate change, sustainable production, international governance etc – in which the longue durée ...”

“... reported, ‘larger than fellow tech giants Facebook and Amazon, and big US companies such as J.P. Morgan and Procter & Gamble’. SoftBank’s $20 million investment was now worth $70 billion – a 350,000 per cent gain. Because Alibaba was so valuable, Son could sell its shares as needed to shore up SoftBank’s finances.Son had ‘smelled the money’ in ...”

“... across their ancient homeland. Hämäläinen relates the account given to the English explorer David Thompson by one of the Blackfeet Indians, Saahkómaapi. In around 1730, the Blackfeet heard that there were horses in Snake Indian country and that not far away was the body of a horse that had been killed by an arrow. They found the dead horse and gathered ...”

“... thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs like Boris Johnson and David Cameron, underwent significant revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the horse path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for ...”

“... project begged more questions than it answered. ‘I regard these small rockets,’ Sir Morien Morgan, director of the RAE, said to the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, ‘in very much the same way I regard simulators and wind tunnels.’ Black Arrow was an ‘experimental tool’ for the nascent British satellite industry. It ...”

“... unburrowed and Abercrombie moved east to rebuild Hong Kong. The name ‘Crossrail’ was coined by David Barran, a monocle-wearing, snuff-snorting industrialist, in a 1974 report drawn up at the request of the Department of the Environment. Barran, like Abercrombie, proposed two tunnels, one from London Bridge to Victoria, the other from Paddington to ...”

“... controversy by whose lurid light his subsequent work was prejudged and has been judged ever since. David Womersley – now Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford – stands at the head of those scholars who try to situate Gibbon in his 18th-century context, thus raising and trying to answer many questions, of which that just framed is central to the ...”

“... do. But so also do a collection of people whom I’ve never seen before, and in such numbers that David Hyde Pierce, who is presenting it, is practically elbowed out of the way. These turn out to be the backers who, of course, have every reason to be pleased and indeed one of them duly adjusts my tie. I am then bundled out through a back door and across the ...”

“... be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify. And ...”

“... of the Sun, told the Commons select committee for culture, media and sport in March 2003. (Piers Morgan, at the time editor of the Daily Mirror, privately chided Brooks for ‘dropping the tabloid baton’.) The MP Chris Bryant protested that paying police was illegal. Andy Coulson, then editor of the News of the World, quickly stepped in, insisting that ...”

“... to moral discourse and retaining a distinctly clerical air. The Labour guru in postwar Oxford was David Worswick, the well-known economist, not David Worick, as he appears both in the text and the index. By no stretch of the imagination can the students of T.H. Green be said to have ‘invented’ the Fabian Society ...”

“... stones. The anxiety present on every page is: would the paradox succeed? The reputation of Tom and Morgan is higher than her own? Brief despair – will she always be an outsider? Certainly Eliot and Forster had inner and outer selves, a persona which pretended, and an inner art which made life, made interest. And in October 1938 she is lamenting the fact that ...”

“... into the reading room.’ And it’s used defensively, to protect her privacy. ‘Have written to David Godwin pretending not to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the ...”