“... sent to John Taylor. He was in exalted company: other recipients of presentation copies included Charles James Fox, the Duchess of Devonshire, Anna Barbauld, ‘Monk’ Lewis, Dorothy Jordan and William Wilberforce. Taylor’s politics had not changed: he was still involved with the True Briton, and had recently been ...”

“... or any kind of civil liberty. One of Eisenhower’s first moves as president was to appoint Charles Erwin Wilson, the head of General Motors, as secretary of defense. He is the man who said: ‘What is good for General Motors is good for the country and what is good for the country is good for General Motors.’ ‘No administration,’ Stone ...”

“... callow young men should have been the first to invade the floor of the House of Commons since Charles I seems vandalism not so much of the Commons itself as of tradition, the more so because it’s in aid of such an ignoble cause. Though I feel much the same about another vandal, Lord Falconer, and the scrambled abolition of the office of lord ...”

“... a second-class man, and Bagehot was not often wrong.’ Peel lacked the inspirational qualities of Fox and the Pitts, of Gladstone and Disraeli, ‘which is why no party has taken his memory into its care’. This is surely nonsense. Peel is a far more vibrant presence in Conservative politics today than any of the others, because he engaged with the modern ...”

“... inquiries in London might damage his News Corp business in the US, where his holdings included the Fox TV network. He and his fellow directors stood to be prosecuted in the UK under the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and in the US under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Having covered up its activities for years, News Corp reached for the ...”

“... had been caused by a downed weather balloon. It wasn’t until 1994, more than a decade after Charles Berlitz and William Moore’s book The Roswell Incident (1980) had spawned a new generation of conspiracy theories, that the Clinton administration fessed up: the crash was related to a secret surveillance programme, in which balloons had been equipped ...”

“... in reference to the Israeli operation against Hizbullah; Starmer arrived with a letter from King Charles. On Friday, 26 February Zelensky got out of his car wearing a black tactical sweater. ‘Oh, you’re all dressed up,’ Trump said. They went to the Oval Office to begin their meeting. The usual pool of White House journalists had been expanded to ...”

“... this, forgetting to mention that Rome was in fact taken by mercenaries of the Catholic Emperor Charles V. More was astonishingly disingenuous. Throughout the late 1520s, he claimed that anti-clericalism was identical with heresy, when he, an early anti-clerical, knew this to be untrue. In reply to one Simon Fish, who had argued that England’s travails ...”

“... less eliminating women from both the class and the cause. It has recently been argued by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in Feminism without Illusions that feminism when cultivated as ‘sisterhood’ is in danger of eluding class realities: ‘Sisterhood invokes non-political relations ... In so doing it missed the point ... feminist politics of the personal ...”

“... Even his own so-called autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (1960), co-written with Charles Samuels, bowdlerised the evocative sludge of his talk and his harrowing, sodden years in the wilderness. Keaton couldn’t explain himself or his context. Words weren’t his language; he spoke in action. In one of many piquant anecdotes in James ...”

“... public that he had miraculously become a mature statesman. Meanwhile, the certifiably conservative Fox network, owned by Rupert Murdoch, resounded with calls for all-out war against an ill-defined enemy. When a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia made the point that the United States has directly or indirectly visited a great deal of violence on the Middle ...”

“... slogan, a Conservative government would ‘roll forward the frontiers of society’. Joel Charles, the chairman of the Kent University Conservative Association, who was seated on the stage and was also wearing a pale pink tie, nodded emphatically when Letwin delivered this line. Fifteen days earlier, it had been one of the main soundbites in ...”

“... when he has learnt, that a Horse is an Animal, & Billy is better than a Horse, & such like,’ Charles Lamb complained, preferring instead ‘that beautiful Interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child’. Barbauld taught for 11 years, and went on to a long and diverse career in ...”

“... of the Western allies and the substantial egos of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Field Marshal Montgomery and General Patton. Dad thought Eisenhower was a man with ballast, a leader. But the Finnegans wanted to argue Ike’s policies.Note the trace of red-baiting in the bit about the steel company (‘un-American’); the ...”

“... long-held principles to be elevated to a professorship at Harvard, primetime punditry on CNN and Fox, and high-altitude wonkfests at Davos and Aspen. He quickly and frictionlessly became the most conspicuous refugee from post-imperial Britain to cheerlead Washington’s (and New York’s) consensus. To a reader from the world the British supposedly ...”