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“... book on the United States of America since Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Yes, a grand statement, but also a remorseful one, because New York cannot allow Morris’s Manhattan incident to be judged as the literary sequel to the canny French aristocrat’s 1830 discourse on the tyranny of the majority, the price of a just society, and the ...”

“... for New Times’ – a general political statement or programme – and a fable for the 1990s by David Edgar. The book is long, and since several contributors are responsible for more than one essay, there is a good deal of repetition. Tighter editorial control would have done no harm, though that might have been construed as inhibiting the openness of the ...”

“... another socialist doctor, Leslie Haden Guest, who later became a Labour MP. Her second husband, David Eder, also a doctor, ‘was one of the first English medical men to fall under the influence of Freud’ and to disseminate his ideas. A Zionist of the mild kind, he envisaged a Jewish State as part of the British Empire. The Eders’ house was ‘a meeting ...”

“... Edgbaston speech? When Joseph addressed the Edgbaston Conservative Association at Birmingham’s Grand Hotel on 19 October 1974, the Conservatives, under Ted Heath, had just lost a general election and Joseph had emerged as the likeliest alternative leader. However, in a speech which deliberately departed from economic issues to denounce the permissive ...”

“... incantation, pure sound. This is something it can never achieve; but it can play with the idea. David Means’s first collection of stories, Assorted Fire Events, teeters on the edge of incantation in long, mesmeric, many sub-claused sentences that threaten to lose you as they go on. I admire his sense of rhythm. At the same time, his writing possesses a ...”

“... David Abulafia ends his engaging survey of the first encounters between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the New World with the words of the prophet Malachi: ‘Have we not all one father? Has not one God created us?’ This question, with its corollary, ‘Why do we deal treacherously, every man against his brother, profaning the covenant of our forefathers?’ looms large in his book, just as it did in the minds of more thoughtful 16th-century Europeans as they became aware that the world was more diverse and more crowded than their forefathers could ever have imagined ...”

“... radio, time-saving and sometimes life-saving conveniences which he disdained. In the words of David Grann, whose compelling new book, The Lost City of Z, tries to make sense of the man and his last mission, Fawcett ‘ventured into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose’. He was an ...”

“... as well as the jacket – and matching hat. Four hundred white doves were meant to fly out of the grand pianos. (When they didn’t, Reid and Taupin ran around scaring the birds, which eventually flew off.)Elton became skilled at throwing tantrums. Early in 1974, while recording in the Rocky Mountains, he announced that he hated ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down ...”

“... it a drawing-room with blue-grey walls and reproduction furniture in a Louis XV style, including a grand piano by Erard painted with putti and other pinky figures and a bow-fronted display cabinet containing porcelain and ivory figurines. French windows led to a terrace with steps down to a garden which had a long lawn and a large greenhouse.Upstairs there ...”

“... in order to increase use of the line and stimulate regeneration in those areas were all given the grand appellation ‘International’, though Eurostar trains don’t stop at Stratford and probably never will. The fact is that with a maximum of eight trains an hour, including domestic services, the line is operating at less than half its potential ...”

“... and once more the effect is to suggest that posterity has been barking up a single branch in the grand outspreading oak of a career. True, but it isn’t Pepys’s career which matters, except to the administrative historian. He is the master of a form which denies the teleology of outward progress, which relegates consequence in favour of subsequence, which ...”

“... failed to respond to this compliment with any valuable acknowledgment, Thomson, Aaron Hill and David Mallet prepared satirical verses on unsatisfactory patrons to preface the second edition of ‘Winter’. Compton stepped in in time (with civility and 20 guineas), and Thomson judiciously persuaded his friends to tone down their verses, or at least to ...”

“... structured by the motifs and conventions of revenge tragedy: resentment, conspiracy, delay, the grand soliloquy and, above all, tortured bodies.Reflecting on the prominence of ‘the morbid and the tragic’ in his own work, the Guyanese poet David Dabydeen once said that ‘the plantation experience had severe and ...”

“... the footstool and candelabra in the unfinished portrait of Madame Récamier when he was a pupil in David’s studio). The objects represented here can be traced from old inventories; indeed, an academic study exists devoted solely to Ingres’s eloquent mantelpieces. He shows not the slightest hint of embarrassment about the material expression of power ...”

“... satisfying and tautly constructed defence of ‘Thatcherism’ as theory, as policy and as a grand historical experiment. If these chapters are the intellectual spine of the book, there are others on the menu which flesh out the story of the Thatcher Government with more immediacy. For example, Chapter 3 describes how the Thatcher Government took ...”