“... radios, clothing) its population demanded. Our understanding of that national economy owes much to David Edgerton, who in a smart piece on port cities explains that inner-city docks declined not just because of containerisation but also because Britain – like France – was once again growing most of its own food; when imports shot up again in the 1980s (of ...”

“... exes are a hard-publishing lot. So far we have had diaries from two of its central figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, and from a spin-doctor hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his ...”

“... a climax to two decades in which his year had pivoted on Rome’s big March exhibition, held at the Pantheon, and its August one, at San Giovanni Decollato. Xavier Salomon, in a catalogue essay about these artist-organised events, describes Rosa reaching ‘a level of panic, over-working and exhaustion every summer, in the Roman heat’, as he ...”

“... a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. (According to a Defense Department consultant, US intelligence has long known ...”

“... opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’, has ...”

“... in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being shelled: ‘They must be mad. Don’t they know it’s very unsafe shooting things at other people?’ A US Sergeant in Vietnam recalled: ‘You thought, “How the fuck can they do this to ...”

“... following chronologies rather than personal histories, to a part of the California scene they are held to oppose, but with which they share an uncannily similar history. I’m thinking of the Grateful Dead. In the musical-historical imagination – with its New York v. California, but especially its punk v. hippie oppositions – the Dead ought to be the ...”

“... It is ‘boarded up, freighted … hoisted into a ship’, ‘pawed about’ by sailors, bumped, held up and hassled, ‘till at length it arrives at its destination, tired out and jaded, from a brisk sentiment into a feature of silly pride or tawdry senseless affectation’. This stretching of everyday meaning for comic effect is a feature of Dickens’s ...”

“... rather than padlock themselves to the gates of Downing Street. Strangest of all, in September 2015 David Cameron wrote to the Conservative leader of Oxfordshire County Council to complain about cuts it had recently announced: I was disappointed at the long list of suggestions floated in the briefing note to make up significant cuts to frontline services ...”

“... simply, on the novel’s first page, do you want the schoolboy Charles Bovary’s trousers to be held up by braces, or do you want his pants to be held up by suspenders? The decisions, and the colouration, are irrevocable. So we might fantasise the translator of our dreams: someone, naturally, who admires the novel and its ...”

“... presumably, many straight readers. Perhaps a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise the very different ways in which each country is ...”

“... still exercised by the American ambassador and the American military commander, Lieutenant-General David Barno. Afghans and foreigners alike call Karzai the mayor of Kabul and Khalilzad the proconsul. Those close to both report that Karzai not only defers to Khalilzad but seeks his advice on all important issues. It was Khalilzad – American-educated and ...”

“... and the political economists concerned the question of economic value. Smith, Ricardo and Marx all held that labour, in Smith’s words, constituted ‘the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities’. Marx most fully developed the argument that the labour time embodied in commodities, including whatever means of production go into furnishing ...”

“... of reality was taking over. I felt confused, frantic, and there was no escape.’ One officer held her hands and pleaded: ‘You need to tell me who the murderer is … You know who killed Meredith.’ And at that moment, Knox says, she snapped and told them Lumumba had done it. They gave her a confession to sign. It said that she’d met up with Lumumba ...”

“... male – a music teacher in Red Cloud, an English professor at the University of Nebraska – she held fairly unabashedly to the idea that whatever intellectual or artistic gifts a woman might happen, freakishly, to possess inevitably came down to her from some paternal source. Even the great Duse, she believed, was first and foremost a ‘daughter of ...”