“... Britain’s EU referendum was not a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Even so, the government may have reassured themselves that ‘leave’ carried more negative resonances than ‘remain’. Leave … and go where exactly? What kind of affirmation is leave? What kind of identity or vision does it assert? But among the many things unreckoned with by ...”

“... over Maastricht without ever recovering politically, Major finally got ratification through in May 1993, a couple of days after the Danes were forced into holding a second referendum. At the Treasury, Kenneth Clarke presided over a return to growth, but it was of no electoral avail. The Conservatives were comprehensively thrashed in the elections of ...”

“... most African Americans are also European Americans. She thinks that one of her great-grandfathers may have been from Italy, hence a family preference for Italianish names: her mother derived Condoleezza from con dolcezza. One of her biographers, Elisabeth Bumiller, says that Rice likes to joke with friends about whose white ancestors were the most ...”

“... children were laced. In Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), the five-year-old Infanta Margaret Theresa, daughter of Philip IV of Spain, has a precociously manipulated figure, her little torso moulded into a triangle above the ballooning shape of her tiered skirt. Promoters of female dress reform (‘healthful underdressing’) in the 19th century stressed ...”

“... an expedient way of bashing opponents while pursuing some ulterior goal? Historical re-enactment may be fine for the Daily Mail and the grassroots, but it doesn’t seem a strong enough motivation to support a professional political career. We need to know not just what kind of past the Brexiteers imagine, but what kind of future they are after. One ...”

“... on Victorian and modern literature are published now. The theoretical essays will come out next May. Born in 1928, Miller took his first degree in science. He converted to literature as a graduate and was steeped in New Criticism during its most doctrinaire phase. He describes his emancipation from its discipline as something comparable to Dorothea’s loss ...”

“... Sinn Féin looks set to become the largest party in the assembly following elections on 5 May. O’Neill may well become first minister – the first nationalist to hold the post. Donaldson has said this would be a ‘real problem’ for unionists.In times of crisis, unionism reverts to the Lundy principle. This has ...”

“... spent in Detroit, a youthful backpacking trip to India and a stint volunteering with Mother Theresa, but it’s Mitchell’s classmate and the object of his affection, Madeleine Hanna, who experiences the temptation of modernism. She becomes an English major ‘for the purest and dullest reason: because she loved to read’, and worries that her simple ...”

“... Despite​ Theresa May’s calls during the election campaign for national unity, Britons don’t really live in a nation-state but in a multinational composite state, whose lineaments were set in the period between the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which established the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, and the Hanoverian accession in 1714 ...”

“... have been known to spare the royal decolletage; the Princess shares with the Empress Maria Theresa, whose image graced the old silver coinage, the distinction of being the only bared bosom on view. As a matter of honour, arms, legs and faces must be covered up; so must facts. Sandra Mackey spent two periods in Saudi Arabia: 1978-80, and 1982-84. Her ...”

“... the flux of the trucks and the people coming in and out of the boats.’ Earlier this year, as Theresa May’s government pushed to persuade people to back her EU withdrawal agreement, Dover was held up to illustrate the chaos that might follow from a no-deal Brexit. With no one sure of what customs papers to sign, lorries on their way to the port ...”

“... A city without a past is a city without a future. It may exist as a set of buildings, but not as a culture. But not every city with a past has a future, except as a set of buildings. The springs of innovation may dry up, the crossroads that first gave it its importance may no longer lead anywhere ...”

“... price of food. The pound’s loss of around 10 per cent of its value after the Brexit referendum may have benefited certain export industries and increased the number of tourists coming to the UK, but food price inflation – which until Brexit had been negative – contributed to overall inflation hitting its highest level in four years, at 2.9 per ...”

“... out of step with English opinion; the substantive issues were matters of relative indifference. Theresa May’s political ally, Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, maintained a consistently negative policy towards European integration between the two referendums, though there were noticeable changes in tone and register. In 1975 the DUP’s ...”

“... point is a seemingly minor event: the expulsion of the Jews from Prague by the Empress Maria Theresa in 1744-45. It is chosen in order to demonstrate what Vital describes as the ‘fragility ... of the civilising impact of the Enlightenment’. Whatever the merits of this argument (and, since it is the central point of the book, I shall return to ...”