“... All in all, I get the feeling that TV overrates its audience’s blood-lust, or squirmlust. Take David Dimbleby’s grilling of Tony Blair on Panorama. Most of the interview was spent raking over Blair’s Old Labour past. At first this line seemed fair enough. Blair, after all, had on that very day been assuring his new City chums that almost nothing the ...”

“... and Accusations’ included contributions concerning European history from Norman Cohn, Peter Brown, Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, all professional historians. They were fully integrated with the contributions of the anthropologists. Since that date it has become increasingly common both in this country and elsewhere for historians and social ...”

“... know: let’s find our angriest, shoutiest, most tribal, most aggressive party loyalist. As Craig Brown joked in the Mail on Sunday, it is as if, instead of turning to Doctor Watson for advice, Sherlock Holmes had instead consulted the Hound of the Baskervilles. Campbell is a political journalist who, as part of a not-all-that-complex self-loathing, despises ...”

“... My copy of Plats du Jour now gives forth a mellow smell of old paper; the pages are crisp, brown and dry as Melba toast. But it has outlasted the husband for whose pleasure I bought it by some eighteen years, proof positive of the old saw, ‘Kissin’ don’t last, cookin’ do.’ And now it is a historic object, a prototype of the late 20th-century ...”

“... at the Stade de France in Paris, a match in which France defeated Brazil 3-0; on the same day, David Ginola, retired French footballer and sometime L’Oréal model, became the new face of the anti-landmine movement. So far, so unconnected. But now let’s posit the existence of a mysterious secret organisation working tirelessly and ruthlessly to improve ...”

“... solutions to the present crisis. The traditional social democratic solution, tried by George Brown and Harold Wilson in the Sixties and by Michael Foot and Jim Callaghan in the Seventies, is the ‘social contract’ – a private deal between the Government and the unions, by which the unions trade wage restraint in return for extensions of their ...”

“... the myths mingle in Boorman’s current). In Hope and Glory, it is the calmer Thames, green and brown, that sustains childhood against war and family mishap. And in the last film he directed, Queen and Country (2014), the young hero ends by plunging into the river and swimming to his sister. So in the last hundred pages of Conclusions, the water runs, the ...”

“... the piece on ‘The Radical Literary Tradition’) – a fling at the Establishment which Gordon Brown, as a student at Edinburgh, had defied in the most practical way by getting elected as University Rector, then setting up the Special Publications Board which published the Red Paper and has recently evolved into the pioneering publisher Polygon. But we can ...”

“... back leg straight? How could the sculptor who created such finely articulated hands for his bronze David, and for the marble bust of a woman holding flowers, have been responsible for these wooden extremities, poorly adapted for their purpose and clumsily repeated? Parts of Tobias and the Angel are, however, of outstanding quality: Tobias’s lively features ...”

“... but I am with you. After a routine summons to self-sacrifice – ‘whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots’ – he unleashed the maxim that will guide his policy: From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign ...”

“... the vapid tax-and-spend policies they had drifted into. Their new spokesmen – Vincent Cable, David Laws and Mark Oaten – are the first prominent Liberals since Jo Grimond who could seriously claim to be heirs of the Grand Old Man. Political commentators point out that parties make such shifts because otherwise they have little hope of getting ...”

“... affairs and in the problems confronting Andropov. Soviet Policy for the 1980s, edited by Archie Brown and Michael Kaser, both of St Antony’s College, Oxford, is a collection of nine essays on different aspects of the Soviet system completed six months before Brezhnev’s death. There is one complete dud: John Hazard’s contribution on Soviet legal ...”

“... of US debt. The deal on offer to the Republicans was described by the conservative commentator David Brooks as ‘the deal of the century’, offering ‘trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases’: A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth ...”

“... Too late, David Copperfield realises that he has married an imbecile: Dora is good-looking and affectionate, but she’s useless with a cookery book and incapable of managing servants. She calls her husband ‘Doady’ and begs him to accept that she can never be more to him than a ‘child-wife’. Worst of all, she will never be able to appreciate his genius ...”

“... economic benefits to the cash-strapped council, but these depend on something harder to describe. David Harvey calls it ‘collective symbolic capital’, the ‘special marks of distinction that attach to some place, which have a significant drawing power on the flows of capital more generally’. Edinburgh’s USP is a combination of historical fiction and ...”