“... You wanted us to be more British than the British!’Leroy comes top of his trainee class, quoting Robert Peel’s philosophy of policing to his teachers. His superiors ask him to be the face of a recruitment campaign. But when he is dispatched to his own North London neighbourhood he is forced to confront the reality of his institutional role. On his first ...”

“... and forty years later, Nicholas’s grandson and namesake became a singing boy in the household of Robert Cecil, where he learned the lute and viol. The first of young Lanier’s (for want of a better term) diplomatic missions came in 1611, when Cecil sent him to Venice. Musicians and artists were often used as couriers and spies, and Lanier had the advantage ...”

“... Tebbit said, barring a recession, he could not see Labour being returned again. In that, he may be right. As Peter Jenkins explains, the Labour Party may only be able now to hope for about 35 per cent of the vote. There are fewer trade-unionists and council-house tenants, and the proportion of public-sector employees ...”

“... Revolutionary empire’ is a bold term which may be taken in various senses. Like the Roman and Arab before it, but on a grander scale, the British Empire was a powerful force in drawing peoples out of their separate existences, pulling the world together into one jarring and explosive whole. Its expansion had transforming effects on Britain itself, and through it on Europe ...”

“... inscriptions increasingly unintelligible to the modern inhabitants: visited occasionally, it may be, as a pissoir, a species of visit naturally brief. It is wicked to quote this delicious paragraph, one of the many that can be quoted, if only because it is so supremely quotable, but even more so because its sensational image ...”

“... of answered prayer. What a joy to hear from Mr Beggs of a £1,000 gift for the pulpit. Hallelujah! May that pulpit be the storm centre of the great hurricane of revival. Oh for a tempest of power, a veritable cyclone of blessing, Lord, let it come! Eight years later, the preacher rose up in that enormous pulpit and waved a copy of a historical study which had ...”

“... joke continues to run because James is worried about the worldly obscurity his stylistic obscurity may end in, and the comic heightening of their contrasted fortunes flatters even as it caricatures her. They share the joke, but it in no way settles their differences. In 1913, worried at James’s anxieties about money, she tried to get up a $5000 birthday gift ...”

“... on paper – a foretaste of an exhibition devoted to Freud prints and drawings which will open in May at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and will then travel to four other British venues and on to three museums in the United States of America.* Much of this article arises from conversations which I have had with the artist whilst writing on the early drawings ...”

“... as well as being ultimately pointless. The monetarist sees himself as a moralist, whatever bishops may think. All this led Friedman to conclude that variations in output, employment and (crucially) prices will be minimised by the adoption of a firm ‘monetary rule’. This involves a clear and irrevocable government commitment to expand the money supply at a ...”

“... of denying the immortality of the soul, for example, that sounds less than totally ingenuous. Robert Fogelin, who has written extensively on Wittgenstein and more recently on Hume, is mainly concerned in his latest book to correct an imbalance in Hume interpretation.* In the earlier part of this century a common view was that Hume’s main achievement was ...”

“... Kodak, Mathew Gloag’s, the Financial Times, the Sunday Times and Fiji Film. In his preface, Robert Smith, Chairman of the Domesday Committee, observes: Every Briton is something of an historian. Britons have to be or they are not a hundred per cent British ... This country has been and will continue to be governed through its institutions. Through the ...”

“... Why should cattle be deprived of a calcium supplement? Cement dust, which is an oxide of calcium, may be just the thing: the US Department of Agriculture says a shovelful of cement dust in the trough produces a 30 per cent faster weight gain. There is a problem about delivering all this supercharged supplement to a beast with a digestive tract designed by ...”

“... these labels are meant to be ‘helpful for people who are concerned about eating foods that may help keep them healthier longer’. I’m all for that. The label on the tin of cannellini beans tells me that there’s no fat (saturated or unsaturated) in it and no cholesterol. That’s nice, I think. Like everyone else, I’ve heard that eating a lot of ...”

“... it was just and necessary; and if they were wrong, who’s to blame? A conscientious reader may want to go to a number of other books to check out Littell’s account of events, personalities and organisations. The best is the old classic Anatomy of the SS State (1968), written by four members of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich after they had ...”

“... during ‘cut-backs’ which shelved many FTP projects. When he made the cover of Time Magazine in May 1938 (as Shotover in Heartbreak House), they called him a ‘marvellous boy’. But already the snipers were getting into position. Welles devised the War of the Worlds programme (in one week) partly as a spoof to deflate the impregnable authority of ...”