“... of industry, the role of the unions, immigration, education, the economic and cultural gap between North and South. Several columnists (on both sides of the political divide) attributed Britain’s recent sporting success to Thatcher’s influence, and the culture of money-oriented competitive individualism that characterised her time in office. The London ...”

“... with deep personal sincerity, and such sincerity will often be one of its causes. Oliver North, for instance, was not a hypocrite in any conventional sense, in that his behaviour was neither primarily self-serving nor inconsistent. It was North’s sincerity that enabled him to subvert the institutions for which he ...”

“... Chief of Staff, has claimed that she influenced the sacking of Reagan’s campaign chairman, John Sears, in 1980; Larry Speakes has argued that she kept Lynn Nofzinger from becoming Press Secretary: while Donald Regan, the former Secretary of the Treasury, has accused her of a host of similar sins, including campaigning for the resignation of William ...”

“... as protector. Britain had been approached a number of times, but the Empire had no vacancies. Lord John Russell defined his attitude to Mexico in what could serve as a permanent axiom of British diplomacy: ‘it would be ... unwise to provoke the ill feeling of North America unless some paramount object were in prospect, and ...”

“... confused policy on the former Yugoslavia and its pseudo-populist sneering about ‘abroad’ (take John Major’s especially silly remark that he would not choose to spend a weekend in any of the countries he has visited over the past few years – even though he spends summer holidays in Portugal). An additional element of seediness came with the revelations ...”

“... addresses his girlfriend as Angel Drawers. In other words, he’s a cross between Keith Talent and John Self, a London yob whose conflict with the South American wilds is bound to produce much mirthful copy and rich scope for fatso-baiting. Stockton certainly lives up to his role, screaming for tomato ketchup in the middle of nowhere, sulking in his ...”

“... author of a much-praised work on Plato pitched his council election campaign on a pledge to get North Oxford’s rubbish bins emptied not twice but three times a week. Would that some ambitious young intellectual in the Crossman mould were launching his political career with a similar pledge in these Thatcherite times. Tam’s relatively short volume is not ...”

“... to Lady Dorothy Cavendish, Macmillan became MP for Stockton in 1924. The high unemployment in the North-East between the wars, with its attendant misery, affected Macmillan all his life. He tried hard at the time to improve conditions there and resolved that they should never be permitted to return. Together with the 1914-18 war, Stockton was the strongest ...”

“... cars, houses, people and, naturally, drugs. To read Rieff on Miami is to recall with nostalgia John Berger’s The Seventh Man, with its haunting photographs by Jean Mohr of migrant Turkish or Italian workers in Switzerland, and its affecting notions about home and wandering. Rieff deals, not with a potentially Left force, but with violently right-wing ...”

“... friend Lewis Campbell saw him as ‘a country gentleman, or rather, to be more accurate, a North Country laird’. Maxwell lived in a rather less divided culture than that of C.P. Snow’s absurd caricature. In 1873, he suggested a joke question for the Cambridge mathematics examination, inviting candidates to interpret every vector ‘in literary ...”

“... noodles and foreign holidays. He recommends his travel agent, Philip Davies of Real Holidays, in North London. Presumably Mr Davies sent him East, because it was on the shores of an Oriental sea that Leadbeater had a blinding flash and realised that humans could develop joint stock companies and the iMac because they weren’t crustaceans. A chapter on ...”

“... Mr Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh.) And the realisation of what separation means, put forward by John Bowlby and others, ended the disastrous practice of keeping parents away from child patients in hospitals. In North London, more was being learned about children separated from their families. At Anna Freud’s Hampstead ...”

“... histories, Davies writes, ‘it is as if Anglo-Saxon England were bordered by an ocean to the north and the west as well as by a channel to the south. The mental planet that is peopled by Alfred and the Danes and Harold and the Conqueror has no place whatsoever for Hywell Dda, for Brian Boru, for Kenneth Mac Alpin or Macbeth.’ The culprits here were the ...”

“... one is in the room except a shy freshman. The funny man climbs a rickety ladder to the top of the north-east corner of the room. The books are shelved alphabetically by author; the As begin in that corner. He picks up the first book, reads a few pages, slams it shut, picks up the second … The other novelty contained in this book is the translation of a talk ...”

“... was time to pull down their cowshed and build a visitors’ centre. At the Vatican, however, Pope John Paul II disregarded a petition to complete Hildegard’s formal canonisation process (aborted in 1243) and declare her a doctor of the Church. Evidently, this most uppity of medieval women is not a model the Pope wants to raise up for emulation in the new ...”