“... on rugby and the Students’ Union, he is far less well educated than his hero – and many other Welsh miners of that time – who had to rely on the painfully-acquired library of the Tredegar Workmen’s Institute.) He was brought up in the sort of upwardly-mobile Labour family which was determined that its sons should not have to follow their fathers and ...”

“... makes the point. The book’s plot is a more routine contraption, bolting together elements of David Lodge and Henning Mankell. Ivan has been brought to Helsinki by Olga Pavlovna, a Russian linguist who wants to display him at a conference to prove her theory of the hybridity and geographical dispersion of the Finno-Ugric languages. Somewhat ...”

“... in the shape of That Was the Week That Was, which first aired on 24 November 1962, presented by David Frost. With the cancelling of that show little more than a year later, ostensibly on the grounds that it interfered with the BBC’s duty of impartiality in the run-up to the 1964 election, the heyday of anti-establishment comedy was already over. Yet its ...”

“... Victor Pasmore – there were more eccentric talents of various sizes, like Stanley Spencer and David Jones, who were very English (or very Welsh) and not international at all. In drawings of wrapped sculpture in landscape and moonstruck megaliths Moore and Paul Nash gave even Surrealism an English edge. You could find ...”

“... great deal of light on the possibilities of reviving written Scots is cast by the festschrift for David Murison, Scotland and the Lowland Tongue. The collection contains a number of pieces of very high quality, which is perhaps not surprising, since few people would want to present anything but their most respectable work to Murison, the wittiest of ...”

“... an equalising New Zealand try, though the referee decided otherwise. And the Springboks beat the Welsh 11-0. The symbolic trouncing of the male leadership élite by the wild colonials caused some piquant heart-searching. In the aftermath of Boer War reverses, it had been possible to attribute the peril of the imperial master-race as much to the physical ...”

“... the bass voice that announced coming attractions at the cinema clearing its throat; it was like a Welsh male voice choir saying ‘RUM’ in unison. It was the sound of a community centre in the west of England, every chair filled and every spare standing space occupied with onlookers, journalists, locals, cameramen, people who had no reason or every good ...”

“... salmonella’). Then there is the long line of sex-scandal casualties: Cecil Parkinson, Tim Yeo, David Mellor (greatly exaggerated, but not his only alleged misdemeanour), Hartley Booth, Michael Brown (though he is a borderline case, since he resigned from office while denying allegations that he had had a homosexual relationship). We should also not forget ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... becomes home secretary. Bob Ainsworth replaces John Hutton at defence and Peter Hain returns as Welsh secretary. Not forgetting Alan Sugar, who has been appointed ‘enterprise tsar’ in place of the unlamented Digby Jones. Another classic piece of gimmickry which will inevitably backfire. Whatever next? Susan Boyle for culture minister? 7 ...”

“... Besides, devolution was bequeathed by Old Labour to Blair as a way of holding off Scottish and Welsh nationalism, not because it was desirable in itself.Still, it happened and the Conservatives opposed it. Under Thatcher and Major the Conservative Party’s constitutional record was lamentable: neither devolution nor the restoration of London local ...”

“... and it seemed inevitable that they would be tortured. The two defence counsel, George Bizos and David Soggot, brought in Kentridge and an urgent application, based on the evidence elicited from the prosecution witnesses, was made for injunctions forbidding the police to ill-treat them. The judge refused to treat the application as urgent, with the result ...”

“... bridegroom were dispatched from the comforts of the court at Richmond to spend Christmas in the Welsh Marches so that Arthur could resume his duties as Prince of Wales. There had been doubts about whether Catherine should go. Some feared that too much sexual indulgence might sap the prince’s strength (Catherine’s newly-wed teenage brother Juan had ...”

“... possibility that some riots may be modelled on the carnival or Saturnalia, that they may be fun. David Matza claimed some years ago, in his book Delinquency and Drift, that criminologists have taken delinquency rather too seriously, casting it as the fateful pursuit of those intent on profit or a grim lawlessness. He claimed that since Frederick Thrasher ...”

“... 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 ...”