“... by this point driven almost mad by its antagonism towards Europe and its commensurate contempt for John Major – refused to endorse a party and instead chose to support whichever candidate was the most Eurosceptic in each constituency. The result was that the Times encouraged its readers to vote for Jeremy Corbyn in Islington. For much of its history it had ...”

“... policy in Germany, Russia and the United States. In 1902, Balfour succeeded his uncle, Lord Salisbury, as Prime Minister and introduced the Aliens Bill, the first piece of modern immigration legislation, in order to prevent East European Jews from finding refuge in Britain. (Echoes of Balfour’s resistance to the Eastern hordes persist in Jack ...”

“... to the university to get a degree. Storey wonders if he might not have absorbed the teaching of John Ruskin, who had urged undergraduates to chivalric derring-do in the waste spaces of the earth. But he arrived too late to hear Ruskin’s famous lecture on the ‘imperial duty’ of founding colonies and the evidence for Ruskin’s impact on his thinking is ...”

“... be equally true of its paraphrasable content.’ Taking issue with a recent editor of the Sonnets, John Kerrigan, she points to his lack of interest in the linguistic variation in sonnet 129, and says he takes ‘a single-minded expository view of the poem, as though it were a self-consistent sermon’. For Vendler, the verbal imagination’s true intent is ...”

“... Thatcherite views, an admiration for Norman Tebbit and Roger Scruton, and a subscription to the Salisbury Review. The moment of truth arrived in 1964 when Wilson became prime minister and attempted to impose his own appointee as head of MI5. The service resisted and Wilson backed off. Indeed, to prove his good will Wilson even acquiesced in the continuing ...”

“... idioms, indecipherable accents. Basic training in North Wales, musketry and manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain, the march to Southampton and the night crossing to France in December 1915, the first experience of a long-range heavy shell: these rites of passage are distributed between the flickering personae of In Parenthesis, as a prelude which takes up ...”

“... top connections to suppress potential rivals surfacing in such inchoate centres of learning as Salisbury and Northampton. An essential dislike of competition and a distaste for market forces are not, therefore, only features of Oxford’s history in the early 19th century, when dons opposed the new foundation of the ‘godless’ University of ...”

“... visited the cabinet room, Cummings found no tools at all. ‘In the 19th century at least Lord Salisbury used the fireplace as a tool. He would walk around the table, gather sensitive papers, and burn them at the end of meetings. The fire is now blocked. The only other tool, the clock, did not work when I was last there. Over a century, the physical space ...”

“... because he has run out of animal comparisons. It took a while for this manner to change. King John, a bit later, has some intensities of a sort not to be found in its predecessors, but it remembers the old redundancies. Here Salisbury is protesting against the King’s decision to be crowned a second ...”

“... year, leaving Edington after breakfast, walking round the edge of the military exercise area on Salisbury Plain and pausing at the Iron Age fort on Battlesbury Hill, which looks out over the British army’s Wiltshire estate. Since then most of the army in Afghanistan had come back to Britain, and an item of furniture had been added to the Battlesbury ...”

“... Two important correspondences in particular have recently come to light: one with James Harris of Salisbury, the author of Hermes, whom Johnson called ‘a prig, and a bad prig’, but who was a warm friend to Fielding, lent him money sometimes, and wrote an unpublished essay on his ‘Life and Genius’; the other concerned with Fielding’s legal and ...”

“... or of the hospitality Douglas’s mother had offered, what he called ‘the cold cheap wine of Salisbury’. He resented being used as a pawn in the game between father and son: ‘I had something better to do with my life than to have scenes with a man, drunken, déclassé and half-witted as he was.’The word ‘déclassé’ is interesting here. In De ...”

“... my father, the Chinese Maritime Customs. But this work, much of it from the distinguished hand of John Fairbank, was mostly concerned with the 19th-century origins of the institution, shedding less light on modern times. For its more recent history, it was not even very clear where the records lay: the best contemporary guide to Chinese archives, produced in ...”

“... punishment in the United States subsists – inescapably – in a miasma of race. The Honorable John H. Land in 1977 presided over the trial of a black man called William Brooks, whose case McFeely follows. Land is the son of a prominent local dignitary who had seen to the lynching of an adolescent boy 65 years earlier. The barefoot ‘little black ...”