“... a majority in the Parliament in 2011; the mobilising effects of the independence referendum; David Cameron’s decision (presumably well prepared) to use the result as an excuse to push for ‘English votes for English measures’, which allowed the SNP to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. From that moment, as Scottish MPs knew, Labour was finished ...”

“... days a rather smaller fraternity, in academia at any rate) who regard it as the means by which Britain helped ‘civilise’ or ‘modernise’ the world. This, he claims, is ‘generally what the popular British debate about imperialism focuses on today’, and he regards both sides as mistaken, ‘because they get the whole nature of the ...”

“... Turks or Persians, they were in each case under the boot of a central regime prepared to use any means necessary to stifle the merest hint of autonomous sentiment. Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria – despite their abiding differences in other areas – would at times band together to hold down the Kurds, sharing intelligence and co-ordinating security ...”

“... and Vermeer – I started to stumble. It may seem notable that, say, Samuel Johnson and David Garrick set off together to conquer London from Lichfield, or that Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne were once classmates in Aix, but it’s not clear that such coincidences demand joint biographies, let alone overarching hypotheses.Snyder is proper in her ...”

“... dramatised, his master’s compositions. Rembrandt later returned to the subject, at least twice. David de Witt suggests in his catalogue essay that it wasn’t the subject, an exotic conversion story long interpreted in terms of the whitening of the soul by Christian baptism, that encouraged this flurry of painted renditions, so much as the pretext it gave ...”

“... ANC policy, its 1949 Programme of Action had envisaged pressure, typically through strikes, as a means of negotiation. (‘What,’ the presiding judge asked, ‘is the value of participation in the government of a state of people who know nothing?’) But the court became increasingly impatient with the prosecution’s fantasy that the ANC’s concealed ...”

“... or fifteen years – ‘what has come to be called the politics of culture’. This, he explains, means studying painting in the social and philosophical context in which it was seen by the society that produced it, in terms of the roles, acknowledged or unacknowledged, that it may have played, of the conflicts implicit in individual works and of what they ...”

“... who write poetry of home are often aware of its dangers though they may not always avoid them. David Dabydeen’s ‘Coolie Odyssey’, dedicated ‘for Ma’, and included in Section One of the four-part ‘alternative’ anthology, The New British Poetry, opens: Now that peasantry is in vogue, Poetry bubbles from peat bogs, People strain for the old ...”

“... and outer chaos is such that one occasionally imagines it could be easily made into a movie (by David Mamet, perhaps, another connoisseur of the disturbing set-up), but then come such wonderful moments as the following, when Nashe and the gambler Pozzi arrive for the big game:Nashe put the car into neutral, applied the emergency brake, and climbed out to ...”

“... with mink collars and cuffs; her 18-carat-gold belt was decorated with 50 carved emeralds from David Webb, one of the finest jewellers in America; her three-acre garden brimmed with the rarest orchids in Southern California, and her kitchen produced cuisine worthy of connoisseurs. In addition to a Los Angeles mansion in affluent Holmby Hills, the ...”

“... clearly carry weight, but not necessarily an overriding weight in every case. In the 18th century David Hume affirmed, entirely truthfully, that he fully believed, like everyone else, that the sun would rise on the following day, but meanwhile the famous critique of induction – the demonstration that we can have no reason for supposing that the future will ...”

“... capitalist system had only temporarily stabilised itself, and that the stabilisation was not by means of Keynesian welfarism but by reliance on a permanent war economy which proved the continuing irrationality of this mode of production. That the Soviet Union and its satellites were not the affirmation but the negation of socialism, resting on a system of ...”

“... led to massive concentrations of industry and, in the 19th century, to the railways as a means of distribution. Both sources of power therefore give geographic and quantitative indicators for the economy. Some of the maps in Water Power in Scotland stress the sharp upturn in the economy after 1770, and the whole story of the use of this power shows ...”

“... of the editor, even ‘boredom and emptiness were to be experienced to the full.’ By comparison, David Josephson’s more modest essay on Percy Grainger in Music and Civilisation comes as a refreshing surprise. Josephson is a victim of Lang’s musicological high-mindedness only to the extent that he distrusts any kind of ad hominem argument that could ...”

“... keep telling you that a particular phrase is indeed proverbial and that you can find out what it means by consulting the Oxford Dictionary of English ...”