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“... David Womersley’s massive and elegant edition of Gibbon is the better timed because it comes a century after the edition scholars have been obliged to use as the nearest to a critical text. It was in 1896 that J.B. Bury brought out the first volume of his edition, which he reissued in 1909 and which until now has been considered standard ...”

“... regimental service in Ireland and India was dominated by his love of sports and hunting, but Sir David Fraser rightly demolishes the conventional assumption that such interests are incompatible with professional zeal. In fact, Alan Brooke took soldiering extremely seriously, especially the acquisition of languages and every aspect of gunnery. He married on ...”

“... officials. He also dangled the prospect of a direct meeting with Putin. This was dressed up as a means of achieving a ‘game-changing effect … in bringing the end of the new Cold War’. Over the next few months, Page started supplying the campaign with talking points about Russia policy and helped provide an outline for an energy policy speech Trump gave ...”

“... steps like effigies to some exhausted god of creation.’ Into this quiet world rides a knight. David Knight is a handsome lieutenant with hair in ‘Cellinian frescoes and fashionable porticoes over his dented brow’. He carves their names into a tree. ‘David, ...”

“... west. Bailyn’s Peopling lays great emphasis on the mechanisms of long-distance land grab, the means by which men with political clout were able to get big chunks of estate in profitable valleys or by useful waterways, and then tempt out the settlers whose work would make these valuable. He sees that, with a fluid frontier, tenancy agreements were unlikely ...”

“... and dominated popular understanding of the nations’s common past for more than half a century. David Cannadine’s characteristically spirited and combative study is more than just an intellectual biography: it is a work of piety, advocacy and passion. He uses the corpus of Trevelyan’s historical writings over fifty years – Wycliffe, Garibaldi, the ...”

“... the novel power of social media to drum up interest and financial support. His campaign manager David Plouffe liked to say of Obama’s candidacy: ‘Walking a tightrope without a net … That’s when we are at our best.’ Yet when Obama does make a misstep – and inevitably there are plenty, from dismissing Clinton as ‘likeable enough’, to ...”

“... notion that in the kitchen there is nothing new and nor can there be anything new’. What this means is that recipes nicked from an admirably diverse cast of victims are interspersed with discussions of some of history’s ‘higher cribbers’: Borges, Montaigne, Stevenson, Eliot, Mann and Harold Bloom; Michel Tournier and Alain Robbe-Grillet; pretend ...”

“... things​ in the relations between authors and publishers never change. Dear Mr Murray, edited by David McClay (John Murray, £16.99), a collection of letters written to six generations of the Murray family, is full of familiar complaints. Jane Austen was ‘very much disappointed … by the delays of the printers’. Maria Rundell, author of A New System of ...”

“... for dead. The last full-scale history of English literature that anybody has bothered over was David Daiches’s two-volume Critical History of English Literature. When it appeared, in 1960, it was thought gallant but defeated. For a successful history of English from a single pen, we must no doubt go back to Saintsbury, who is still readable. There is ...”

“... one, within limits. The use of idea-signs, phonetic signs and various combinations of the two, means that early writing systems tend to be complex, with as many as one or two thousand signs, or more in the case of Chinese. They lead also to polyvalency, i.e. using the same sign in more than one function. Phonetic scripts (syllabaries and ...”

“... of a sort, making the point that BBC English and Received Standard Pronunciation are by no means the only language available to us. Such evidence and such a point offer only a sparse diet for the imagination if they come to us in the medium of stories that labour their messages and signal their punchlines and summarise crucial episodes in stories that ...”

“... and important of the municipal buildings of the city in which it is placed. It should be the means of giving due expression to public feeling upon all national and municipal events of importance. It should serve, as it were, as the exponent of the life and soul of the city.’ Thus conceived, in terms almost as anthropomorphic as architectural, town ...”

“... of power than their comrades in the national assembly. They were removed only by extra-legal means, the coup in July 1932 that proved beyond reasonable doubt that Weimar democracy was dead. That coup in Prussia was mounted by Prussians, the same figures (Papen, Schleicher, Hindenburg) who would later miscalculate so disastrously in their dealings with ...”

“... for a sign’, but they often turn out to have been wearing sackcloth coats – ‘naked’ here means without shoes, hats or outer garments. Men and women both wore smocks, and you could be ‘naked in your smock’. (There was no ‘underwear’, so everyone was naked under their smocks.) People did not take their clothes off to go to bed, but they did ...”