“... with Gladstone dead, and Chamberlainite imperialism at its zenith, dangerous schemes such as Home Rule seemed to be off the cards. A valuable radical inheritance was there to be won: Lloyd George was ideally equipped to claim it. As Professor Gilbert shows, land reform – or more crudely, attacks on landlords – constituted the one completely ...”

“... war with East Asia and Sandino is, maybe even was, a Christian. Well, that’s a relief. Thank the Lord for Newspeak. So why not thank the Pope for Lordspeak? It’s a bit the same when we come to Ireland, about which O’Brien writes with deep knowledge and passion. At the end of the day he seems to have swallowed the whole of the Ulster Protestant case. He ...”

“... what the Conservative Party is for. The pragmatism which Baldwin inherited from the great Lord Salisbury has proved a better guide for most of the ‘Conservative century’. Part of Baldwin’s achievement between the wars was surely to contain the ideologically-driven pressures of faction within his party while opportunistically waiting for the ...”

“... Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, in 1635, to tell him ‘once for all, that though I honour you as my lord, yet my love to you is just of the same nature that it is to Mr Payne, bred out of private talk, without respect to your purse,’ or, one might add, to his rank. In 1668, Hobbes was asked his opinion of Martha Taylor, a victim of what we would now call ...”

“... from Iceland, which first appeared in 1937. Very funny in places, and Auden’s verse ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ is a triumph, though not in the same league as the great man himself; surprisingly, Auden uses a seven-line stanza instead of the eight of Don Juan. Auden and MacNeice’s ‘Last Will and Testament’ which ends the book contains the ...”

“... as the ‘father of his people’; on Victoria’s death it was noted that ‘mother’s come home’; and George V was known as ‘Grandpapa England’. And from there it was but a step to seeing the whole of the British Empire as a great global family, with the monarch at its head – a monarch who, from the Thirties, made this sense of family and of ...”

“... ideas to produce ever more powerful explanations and predictions of physical phenomena – indeed, Lord Rayleigh, addressing the British Association in 1900, felt the need to apologise for the fact that physics was nearly finished. Five years later, Einstein and Planck launched a revolution that would overthrow Newtonianism. Couldn’t the same fate befall ...”

“... have had the subsequent arrival of the fisherman who had lent Pringle dry clothes for the trip home, and the extensive discussion of how much to tip him, and whether to offer him a drink:   Mrs Race said: ‘This sort of question is always so difficult to settle. Afterwards one always feels one has given either too much or too little.’   Barlow ...”

“... Taylor, chief executive of Barclays Bank, to lead a Whitehall task force on tax and benefits, Lord Hollick, chairman of United News and Media, to advise on industrial policy, and Peter Jarvis, Whitbread chief executive, who was asked to head the Low Pay Commission, charged with setting the rate for the planned legal minimum wage. In previous Labour ...”

“... bankers or lawyers or psychiatrists don’t have? In what sense is writing a profession? Birkin, Lord Jim, Lewis’s Tarr are all men of uncertain worldly status. (One of the characters asks of Tarr: ‘What sort of prizes could he expect to win by his professional talents? Would this notable arriviste be satisfied?’) They are the kind of people, one might ...”

“... affairs was becoming both difficult and costly. Churchill, who left the War Ministry and succeeded Lord Milner as Colonial Secretary, had devised a cheaper strategy that he now imposed, using bombers and armoured cars without ‘eating up troops and money’. The air squadrons in Iraq launched one of history’s first full-scale aerial bombardments of a ...”

“... their imperfect legislation. We stand up for self-government, and oppose centralisation. When Lord Morpeth sought to expand the role of the state in the 1848 Public Health Act, he was abused for undermining Britain’s Saxon constitution. The ‘mental imbecility which is everywhere produced in the masses’ when one man in Whitehall is made responsible ...”

“... eat. Each of the addenda that concern us here could conceivably be published independently of its home text. This happens, particularly, to prolegomena. They are then said (by me) to be untethered. That is why some of the selections in The Book of Prefaces seem sufficient and complete in themselves and others feel fragmentary and rather lost. The selections ...”

“... in the United States. There the incautious motorist risked having an advertisement inserted in his home-town newspaper informing ‘whom it may concern’ that Mr X. Y. had been requested to leave his hotel in such-and-such a town for entertaining in his room a lady not his wife (for more about this collusive racket made possible under the Mann Act, which was ...”

“... festivities in 1998, pilgrims flocked by the busload to the Rhineland abbey she founded, the home today of a flourishing Benedictine community. By the time the nuns of Eibingen had received 150,000 guests in six months, they decided that it was time to pull down their cowshed and build a visitors’ centre. At the Vatican, however, Pope John Paul II ...”