“... problems? There is no evidence that he foresaw what the longer-term consequences of either Welsh or Scottish devolution would be, or that he anticipated his humiliation at the hands of Ken Livingstone over the mayoralty of London. His reform of the House of Lords is stalled, after long vacillation, in a worst of all worlds: a minority of persons of ...”

“... and erotic fantasies that credited evolution to male aggression. In The Descent of Woman the Welsh writer Elaine Morgan popularised the ‘aquatic ape’ theory, which located the origins of social organisation not in the African savannah, with violent hunter-gatherers gaining control over inferior competition (as per the ‘killer ape’ theory of the ...”

“... the elect separated out from the reprobate? Even ‘Calvinism’ was ticklish. As David Hall points out, not all Calvinists shared the same eschatology, disagreeing about what happened to souls after death.The question of whether to award the capital ‘P’ or not remains a subject of contention among historians. For Hall, a history professor ...”

“... has advocated ‘home rule all round’ in a new federal union. A similar call has come from David Melding, the Conservative deputy presiding officer of the Welsh Assembly, in The Reformed Union: The UK as a Federation, published last year; while Conservatives at Westminster, including Kenneth Baker, Malcolm Rifkind ...”

“... to ‘scrap the Human Rights Act, and introduce a British Bill of Rights’, but that was in David Cameron’s 2015 manifesto. Johnson’s manifesto promised only to ‘update the Human Rights Act’ – hence the IHRAR – not repeal it.The consultation document gives very little away about what a new bill of rights might look like. How closely it might ...”

“... for military staffs to prepare war plans, or for governments to hint at the use of military force. David Spring shows that Russian leaders knew they had good political, financial, military and social reasons to avoid war, and that their hesitant moves towards army mobilisation were intended only to underscore a firm diplomatic stand, and to deter. The French ...”

“... fell when Froude published his four-volume life of Carlyle and the Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. He thought he had written a sympathetic, indeed affectionate memoir. But he had failed to write the hagiography that was then the desired mode of life-writing. His candour, innocuous enough by any modern standard, in Late Victorian terms was ...”

“... Baker somewhere on a line of descent between Donald Barthelme, with whom he briefly studied, and David Foster Wallace. Yet Howie isn’t void-struck or an object of satire. Like Mike, the narrator of Baker’s second novel, Room Temperature (1990), he just wants to get things ‘correctly situated in the felt periphery of life’. ‘What oft was ...”

“... to English Jacobites, while Philip Jenkins detects a distinctive Jacobite and Country hue in Welsh Masonry. On the other hand, John Money, a keen student of provincial clubbability, notes that while the political stance of Masonry remained broadly Whiggish, in practice the lack of metropolitan control over lodges allowed for considerable local ...”

“... have suspected it, but in Lloyd George’s lifetime it was never publicly exposed. Margaret and David Lloyd George continued to share houses, holidays, family cares and political duties; and Stevenson’s competence at her job (not to mention the fact that she looked, as John Campbell notes, ‘too prim to be anything so improper as a mistress’) warded ...”

“... Devils of Loudun (1952), ‘can listen for very long to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality. All we can safely predict is that, if exposed long enough to the tom-toms and the singing, every one of our philosophers would end by capering and howling with the savages.’ In ...”

“... one British regiment – the Royal Welch Fusiliers – in that campaign. (Most of them weren’t Welsh, incidentally.) The second war scarcely anyone in Britain has heard of, and even Americans seem to be hazy about it. It ran from 1812 to 1815; the peace that formally settled it was signed on Christmas Eve 1814, but because news took so long to travel not ...”

“... lyrics in Old and Middle English. Wellesley devotes a few intriguing pages to a 15th-century Welsh-language poet, Gwerful Mechain, whose diverse oeuvre ranges from religious verses to an ‘Ode to the Vagina’ and a savage stanza addressed ‘To her husband for beating her’. Medieval books are known for their aesthetic of plenitude – and not ...”

“... essays – during the period of composition the world does nothing but give you gifts.They love David Foster Wallace here, and I have read no one but him for months. His books are everywhere in tall voluble stacks – a writer is always everywhere when you are working on them. I feel partially disrobed when I see his name. At my sickest, I had begun asking ...”

“... compounded the mistake two days after Smith was buried. I made my speech in honour of him at the Welsh Labour conference in Swansea in which I set out a vision of a party awash with ideas, vibrant with dynamism and purpose, that would reform the welfare state and appeal beyond our heartlands. It did not make the impact with the media that I had hoped. I had ...”