“... democracy’. This revolt against the era and ethos of the CBCs (Bill Clinton, Blair, Bush Jr, Brown, Cameron and Hillary Clinton) offered the giddy prospect of ‘a jailbreak from the old order’, filling its supporters with ‘energy and glee’. Barnett respects ‘the audacity of those I know who voted to Leave. They are not racists, they are ...”

“... wartime inflation. In the winter of 1946-7, Goodman, Woody Herman, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Les Brown, Harry James, Jack Teagarden and Benny Carter dissolved their bands. The big band was never to recover. Even the ‘sweet’ bands, traditional rivals to swing, suffered from a decline in public dancing. There is no ...”

“... western Missouri and eastern Kansas produced Border Ruffians, Jayhawkers, guerrillas and John Brown. Pro-slavery men and Abolitionists, Confederates and Union men murdered their opponents. Unionists expelled many non-combatants in an attempt to deny guerrillas support. The Southern guerrillas rode under the black flag, slaughtering their prisoners. James ...”

“... writing too freely to a publisher. Launched in 1909 the firm began with a general list, of which Jack London was a mainstay. Briefly on the strength were P.G. Wodehouse and Hugh Walpole. Gerald Mills was an intellectual who put up most of the money; it is his fate to become universally and perhaps immortally identified with a branch of literature which was ...”

“... an unpaid stripling in attendance on Sir Theophilus Shepstone, Haggard had helped to run the Union Jack up the flagpole in the Transvaal, to see how many Boers would salute it. Not enough, was the answer. This cordial annexation, conducted with sherry and champagne rather than firearms, led to the first Boer War and the retrocession of the Transvaal. The Royal ...”

“... the poverty line – more than one in three in 1998/99 compared with one in ten in 1979. Gordon Brown has greatly increased income support to unemployed families with children but Jack Straw’s curfew can only damage the cause of ‘social inclusion’. The Government appears to be finding it increasingly difficult as it ...”

“... The new Parliament has not attracted major politicians. Labour heavyweights, such as Gordon Brown and Robin Cook, stayed in London; even Alex Salmond, the leader of the SNP, decided after a term in the Scottish Parliament that he preferred to abandon Edinburgh for the clubbability of Westminster. More significantly, after only a year as first minister ...”

“... has some ten thousand members. However, as James Morone, a professor of political science at Brown University, reassures us, his colleagues in the discipline have themselves a very defective grasp of American political culture. In particular, Morone believes that political scientists are in thrall to the misguided notion that the classical liberalism ...”

“... have been. He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on 25 June 1963 in East Finchley, London, to Jack Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison. Georgios (‘Yorg’ to the family but mispronounced as ‘Yog’ by Andrew Ridgeley, whose version stuck) was the youngest of three ...”

“... London buses made a promotional tour of the Continent. The lead bus, which sported a giant Union Jack, broadcast a continuous recording of ‘God Save the King’ and other patriotic anthems. ‘Not surprisingly’, Richard Weight remarks in Patriots, the convoy ‘got a muted reception when it parked in the ruins of Berlin’. In France, the bus crews were ...”

“... and on Instagram and Facebook, too. ‘I love England,’ she wrote in one post, next to a Union Jack, and ‘Live in London’, beside an emoji of a small house and a very green tree. She liked to imagine that one day she would live in a house like that with her husband, Hassan, and their two daughters. Hassan used to work at the mosque. Later on, when he ...”

“... just casually sentenced to death. Thomas Hardy felt ashamed after watching the hanging of Martha Brown at Dorchester in 1856, expiated perhaps through his creation of that ‘pure woman’ Tess Durbeyfield (though Tess, too, is hanged). But Givens, like the others Campbell meets, is less overtly emotional. Terry Regnier of the Mayo Clinic chuckles at her ...”

“... not in an art gallery but at the Arsenal cinema. Goldin reveres Visconti, Antonioni, Cassavetes, Jack Smith. Her images – I’m thinking of a self-portrait at a window, in which she has a curl at the nape of her neck and scratches on her exposed back – form part of an autobiographical narrative, one that reveals in order to keep battling against denial ...”

“... help to illustrate, the British Empire imposed repressive governance but also bred the warriors (brown, black and white) who would overthrow it. By forcing million-strong population movements, the empire spread diseases, but also developed the medical technology to treat them. Game reserves and national parks were established to protect nature, but were ...”

“... the pay rise of nurses ‘need a sharp blast with an enema tube’. ‘FAT CAT gas boss Cedric Brown’ and other ‘overpaid bosses’ of privatised utilities have also come under fire: ‘If the pigs put their noses much deeper in the trough, they’ll suffocate.’ Disdain for the royal ne plus ultra of Britain’s class hierarchy has long been ...”