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“... Mullan finds plenty of evidence to support this contention. His argument thus reinforces the long-held assumption that Dickens, unlike Eliot, say, or James, wasn’t very good at representing the ‘inner life’. Mullan makes a virtue of a supposed vice. By breaking the rules of literary description, he concludes, Dickens’s fantastic analogies added ‘new ...”

“... conservative Jacques Chirac. But the upsetting result proved a false alarm. Left-wing sympathisers held their nose to vote for Chirac, who won the run-off with a Soviet-like 82 per cent of the vote. Le Pen’s score rose by just one point between the first and the second round, from 17 per cent to 18 per cent. When his daughter, Marine Le Pen, reached the ...”

“... Wellington (her pen as mighty as his sword); Gash’s Peel (a peerless study of a baronet); Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne (one patrician beguilingly evoking another); Blake’s Disraeli (champagne and epigrams all the way); and Marquand’s MacDonald (Fame is the spur stood on its head). But many prime ministers have fared less well: Chatham and Lord John ...”

“... tend to be more immoral than individuals.’ For King himself, according to his biographer David Garrow, Moral Man and Immoral Society was an early and crucial influence. It turned him away from the social-gospel Christianity which looked on war as a unique enemy of progress; Niebuhr, by contrast, taught that war was only one manifestation of that ...”

“... to be in some manner allegories of the Cold War. Aesthetic, commercial and cultural contexts are held in solution, with exactly what aim is not always clear. In a few cases the specimens offer a diagnosis of the world they spring from. The book closes with an account of Kazan and Schulberg’s A Face in the Crowd: an instructive parable, Hoberman ...”

“... David Fincher’s The Social Network, which tells the story of Facebook, is fast and intelligent and mean, a sort of screwball comedy without the laughs. It’s written by Aaron Sorkin, whose credits include The West Wing and A Few Good Men, and based on a novelised history by Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires ...”

“... in a hopeless seat, then the safe Labour seat of Blackburn, which he inherited from Castle and has held since 1979. He has been a very successful local MP in a seat which is now about 2o per cent Muslim, and his account of his relations with the Muslim community is one of the most interesting parts of the book. His political progression was not entirely ...”

“... lack of complexity is also the reason he lends himself to popularising accounts like this one. David Bather Woods writes in a deliberately non-intimidating style as he takes the reader through the various stages of Schopenhauer’s uneventful life. He was born in Danzig in 1788 and visited London as a teenager, where he made sure to drop in at the Bedlam ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to attention following a remarkable exhibition of Dutch painting, ‘Gods, Saints and Heroes’, held last year in Washington, Detroit and Amsterdam. To the outsider (who does not read Dutch) there appears to be quite extraordinarily little external evidence with which to support this new interpretation. Contemporary inventories and nearly contemporary ...”

“... he had compromised the integrity of the historic homeland.In the direct prime ministerial election held on 17 May 1999, Ehud Barak won 56 per cent of the votes to Netanyahu’s 44 – a landslide victory by Israeli standards, and a clear mandate to resume the struggle for a comprehensive peace between Israel and its neighbours. There was a strong sense that he ...”

“... regulators who looked incompetent. Branson’s strategy, his way of portraying himself as a plucky David in a world of corporate Goliaths doesn’t always work. Sometimes the charade is too transparent. Following the failed prosecution, BA turned its attention to alliances and takeovers to shore up its position, first with American Airlines, then Iberia, then ...”

“... and ill-considered) reaction against the generous concessions made to Egypt at Camp David: the war in the Lebanon was the second. Arik Sharon, who dates the start of his planning the war from the day he took office as Minister of Defence in July 1981, spelled out his views in a (Jewish) New Year issue of the muck-raking weekly Ha’olam ...”

“... Titipu-like, to the rank of a village; the assassination attempt on the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, held up planning and decision-making at a vital stage; the First World War brought building almost to a standstill; and the subsequent commissions of inquiry imposed further and drastic economies. As a result, the city took 19 years to build, and was occupied by ...”

“... powerful metaphor for wider social and cultural changes’. Interest in pop music and football is held to be inflated (‘young people spent more time in their bedrooms or at church youth clubs than they did at rock festivals or on the football terraces’), but is also cited as mass popular entertainment to trump the bohemian counterculture. Keen to ...”