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“... admired, History of English Poetry – but his learning was destined to a common obscurity. From David Fairer’s lovingly edited collection of the letters written by and to him, he emerges as the all-knowing but unworldly prof, likeable as the sharp-toothed Malone could never be and recognisable even in our age of Research Assessment Exercises. He ...”

“... time the lonely outsider commemorated by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and (more cannily) Wordsworth. David Fairer maintains that their Wertherisation of Chatterton’s alleged suicide concentrated the Romantic poets’ minds on their own social isolation, on the necessary dissidence of the poet’s task and the short time reserved for its ...”

“... twinklers of an hour, provoke my rage’) for Pope himself. Gerrard follows Howard Weinbrot and David Fairer in championing Hill’s biblical odes The Creation (1720) and The Judgment Day (1721) as significant expositions of the sublime in an age addicted to correctness; but the argument isn’t likely to persuade readers confronted by lines as poor as ...”

“... David Laws​ ’s memoir of his time in government ends with everything in tatters: he has lost his seemingly safe seat, his party has gone from being a full partner in government to having the same number of MPs as the Democratic Unionists, his leader is shell-shocked and barely able to appear in public without breaking down ...”

“... through reform of electoral boundaries under the existing first-past-the-post system to make it fairer (i.e. better for them). That’s the thing about first-past-the-post: the winners get to decide. And that means doubling down on the current system. It is not the case that a Tory government with a small majority won’t be messy too. Commentators are ...”

“... of institutional ones. It may well be true that much of what Corbyn stands for – including a fairer tax system, greater public ownership of key services and more support for the low-paid – is popular with a surprisingly wide swathe of the public. But it won’t make any difference if the news never gets beyond a divided and dysfunctional parliamentary ...”

“... Betty Boothroyd has called on the media to provide ‘fairer and better balanced coverage’ of the House of Commons. ‘Above all,’ she has warned, they ‘should not use the occasion for highly generalised and unsubstantiated comments against Members of the House as a whole and the Parliamentary system’. The ‘occasion’ to which she refers is the inquiry being conducted by a new officer of her House, Sir Gordon Downey, Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards ...”

“... in Britain, but his range is wider, his writing is more sensitive and his judgments are usually fairer, though it is unfair as well as slick to write of Berlinguer’s ‘Gucci socialism’, a phrase which more justly describes its author. He retains his gift for the felicitous phrase and an eye for humbug, and he remains a skilled puncturer of bloated ...”

“... as he had once been duped by Kissinger, he was now comprehensively duped by the Israelis. At Camp David Sadat and Carter even thought they could handle Begin and Dayan, a pitiful notion when one compares those two naive and fundamentally decent men with the Israeli duo, two of the toughest and most obstinate characters in 20th-century politics. Asad’s fears ...”

“... Order of the Brown Nose would stumble before long on an obsequious supplementary question from David Evans, one of the very first Tories to make a million out of privatisation (in his case from rubbish collection). Again and again, at Prime Minister’s Question Time, the blustering MP for Welwyn and Hatfield would rise to sing the praises of his hero in ...”

“... when a change of surface texture – say, between one fabric and another – must be registered. (David would let this French tradition of brushwork be the vehicle for political rather than religious probity.) This is a very different craft from the more energetic kind which makes surfaces in Rubens’s paintings seem more alive than the hair or fur or flesh ...”

“... of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d be sick. Whose United Kingdom? Theirs. The Eton Mess and their cronies. Big Business. Neocons. The warmongers. Not ours. We left Edinburgh at ...”

“... justice (who isn’t?). He is also, on some accounts, a victim: his unfortunate mentor at the LSE, David Held, has described the predicament the ostensibly reform-minded Saif found himself in after his father’s people had revolted as ‘the stuff of Shakespeare’, but that surely is letting everyone concerned off far too lightly. He may just be a ...”

“... presented Sacco to her in a prejudicial one-on-one ‘show-up’, rather than in the much fairer ‘line-up’, in which the witness has to choose between several individuals. And several years after the trial, in 1925, a man already in jail for another murder committed during an armed robbery confessed that he had taken part in the South Braintree ...”

“... the Crown. The tribunal of public opinion was growing more powerful, but it wasn’t necessarily fairer than the Ancien Régime system of government. Darnton’s emphasis on information systems as a factor in modern political change has an obvious appeal. Before the age of revolutions, the printing press had already facilitated the Reformation. The ...”