“... in itself ... the political press lost its bearings, its justification and whatever efficacy it may have had.’ Today there is political journalism without party, which Koss compares to ‘Christianity without dogma’. Under the old party managers who created the political press, a journalist was expected to share the views of his employer, but there was ...”

“... since is only marginally connected to the sexual adventures of top Tories. The word ‘sleaze’ may be new, but the concept is not. British political history this century, from Rufus Isaacs to Horatio Bottomley to Maundy Gregory to John Poulson, is littered with great corruption stories. The explanation for the increase in sleaze under Thatcher and Major is ...”

“... Bolsheviks’ old opponents in the Marxist revolutionary movement) such as Boris Nikolaevsky, David Dalin and Rafael Abramovich – and Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the Russian Provisional government overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1917. When Nikolaevsky and Dalin visited the DP camps in Germany, Russian DPs anxiously waiting for US visas saw them as ...”

“... Africa and Asia don’t seem quite as bad. The perplexingly affirmative work of Niall Ferguson and David Armitage scants, if it doesn’t actually trivialise, the suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its victims. More is said now about the modernising advantages the empires brought, and about the security and order they maintained. There is far ...”

“... describes is a traveller’s nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist ...”

“... must be friends with spiders and snakes, and a whole lot of other nonsensical stuff which we may as well concede is funny in its way and funny to a point. But it is no longer Huckleberry Finn; it is no longer an unflinching tale of the cruelty and wrong of human bondage. ‘In the whole reach of English literature,’ Bernard DeVoto wrote in ...”

“... to extend British airstrikes against Islamic State from Iraq to Syria began in November when David Cameron set out his case to Parliament in relatively decorous terms. By 2 December, when Parliament voted in favour, an older, cruder performance had emerged. One of the prime minister’s enactments back in November was the voice that accompanies TV ...”

“... reject the easy joke; I was a tasteful person now, having passed through the refiner’s fire. 8 May. We had flown into LA from Savannah the night before; the city, from our hotel room, looked like a heat map of itself. The jacarandas were blooming. Everyone describes the jacarandas, but my husband, Jason, was seeing them for the first time, in that ...”

“... hoped that he might provide evidence to link them to the ‘banker’ of the Montonero guerrillas, David Graiver. He might reveal contacts with subversives, conspiracies of ‘economic subversion’. Some of his interrogators and military judges believed that he would reveal himself as ‘one of the sages of Zion, a central axis of the Jewish anti-Argentine ...”

“... immediately, despite Chamberlain’s frantic attempts to hang on, the age of Churchill began. David Faber, an Old Etonian and, like Leo and Julian Amery, a former Tory MP, has had the good idea of writing the story of the father and his two sons. Julian was appointed minister of aviation by his father-in-law, Macmillan, and could claim to be the man ...”

“... pacifying Kandahar or pummelling Gaddafi is somehow essential to preserving their way of life. David Nichols has written a slight, narrowly focused book that provides modest but not inconsequential insight into the origins of America’s involvement in the Greater Middle East. His focus is the Suez Crisis, or more specifically, the way Eisenhower’s ...”

“... which Groebner describes, the many Tartar women are characterised as ‘olive-coloured’, which may be an example of the practice that led to the mental habits of classification discussed by Loomba and Burton. Having explored the various categories of description used by Europeans over the centuries, Groebner turns to the documents and objects of ...”

“... made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David Cameron of his generation, blessed with born-to-the-purple public school assumptions and a casual, unimaginative indifference to the everyday struggles of the masses. Not that there was ever any ‘swank’ about Attlee, but at Oxford between 1901 and 1904 ...”

“... of man from that other one I might have been had I remained in Libya; and the hours after seeing David with the Head of Goliath in the Galleria Borghese, searching for shade and finding a place to rest under a pine on a green beside the Sant’Andrea al Quirinale – all seemed to fold together and collapse like a concertina of days made of the same ...”

“... productive and controversial as ever. The agenda he has set out is far from completion: indeed we may only just be appreciating its measure. The volume concludes with a lengthy commentary by Pocock himself which, in reviewing each of the essays, primarily asks, not how far his earlier positions are vindicated by them, but where we should go next. The last ...”