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“... development. The Liberal Prime Minister Asquith had originally intended to offer the job to Sir Herbert Grierson, recent editor of the poems of John Donne. However, he allowed Lloyd George to persuade him that a post of such eminence ought rather to be a party appointment. Without doubt, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) fitted that bill. He had worked ...”

“... is a rebuke to history teachers in schools for many generations – and not only English ones. David Hume’s eight-volume History of England was as unsympathetic and diminishing to his native Scots as the work of Stubbs and Hallam. The modern scholar, by contrast, makes his own journey into fields he has never penetrated. This is not a handing-down from ...”

“... ergo, first one, then the other, became party leader. Simply through losing his seat in 1931 Herbert Morrison slipped out of the running. The post-war Attlee Government missed a golden opportunity to restructure British society: nothing is more certain than that Morrison would have done no better. So the wearisome catalogue continues with ...”

“... response has been a 100,000-word credo to show he can be a real politician like his grandfather, Herbert Morrison. The decision to write The Blair Revolution was made, Mandelson has explained, after reading a profile I wrote of him last year in the Guardian – ‘the single most damaging piece ever published about me’, he insists – which described how ...”

“... is plenty of theory, too, with lots of citations from Lacan, Berger, Bourdieu, Terry Eagleton and David Halperin. His exposition of these writers is exceptionally clear, but sometimes the theory, which tends to be modern and universalising, sits uncomfortably with the emphasis on cultural specificity. Immediately after an attack on unmediated readings of ...”

“... like tabloid relish. They include murder (Carr’s ‘honour slaying’ of his ex-scoutmaster, David Kammerer, with Burroughs and Kerouac as accessories); needle-drug addiction (‘quite a sensation’ is Burroughs’s comment on being administered his first shot of morphine by Herbert Huncke); and self-mutilation ...”

“... now been few, if any, sustained or systematic analyses of what in the 1930s the American historian Herbert Bolton called ‘the epic of Greater America’. John Elliott’s long awaited book is just that. It not only fills an obvious gap – more like a chasm – but sets the pattern for a whole new historiography of the European colonial empires. As with all ...”

“... tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the ...”

“... generations of Republicans disdained conservatism. Micklethwait and Wooldridge remind us that Herbert Hoover claimed to be a ‘true liberal’. Indeed, nobody in the political mainstream – Republican or Democrat – invoked the cause of conservatism until the insurgencies of Goldwater and Reagan (a former Democrat) within the Republican Party during ...”

“... and natural history within a ‘big history’ such as those outlined by the American writers David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown – or, in the terminology of Edward O. Wilson, in a ‘consilience’, a convergence of intellectual disciplines, humanities with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to ...”

“... Fund, estimates the US subsidy at $83 billion a year. Senators Sherrod Brown (Democrat, Ohio) and David Vitter (Republican, Louisiana) have asked Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, to come up with a more authoritative figure. No one to my knowledge has done the equivalent calculation for the countries of continental ...”

“... street names are a bizarre mélange. North of Selous the next avenue is Livingstone; then comes Herbert Chitepo, named after an African leader martyred in the struggle. To the south, Baker and Speke intrude between Samora Machel and Mugabe. Since those two famous explorers never came anywhere near the territory formerly known as Southern Rhodesia, their ...”

“... forestall their [defection] or to cover their trail.’ Perhaps. Yet it was the British Communist David Crook who did most of the spying on the Orwells – and, according to Gordon Bowker in his biography of Orwell, Crook went on to suggest that Eileen was having an affair with Kopp. The snakepit from which the Orrs scrambled when they left for France was ...”

“... together several times, they were seen in the same way, both key figures in determining what Herbert Read called, in Horizon, ‘the fate of modern painting’. John Lehmann used their work to illustrate a volume of Penguin New Writing and Peter Watson, who co-curated the first exhibition of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, chose both of them, along ...”

“... Round about four in the afternoon the thought of a cold beer would start popping up in my brain. Herbert Fingarette, the best contemporary philosopher of self-deception, has also written a book on alcoholism. Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (1988) argues the opposite case to Ameisen’s. For Fingarette, the view that alcoholism is a ...”