“... until, egged on by his mother, he stole a golden ball that belonged to the fairy king. On his way home he was tripped up by a couple of fairies, who took the ball and vanished. Elidyr was never again able to find his way into fairyland, but in later life he was quizzed by the bishop of St David’s about his experiences and claimed to be able to remember ...”

“... in the 1965 leadership election, a blow from which Maudling never recovered. It was the same at home; indeed, Baston argues persuasively that this was where the trouble began. Maudling’s father – another Reggie – was an actuary, comfortably off, and amusing and generous. But his mother, Elsie, was tough, domineering and status-driven, and Maudling, an ...”

“... crimes, to give British journalists and politicians news they wouldn’t get from the Colonial Office, and to help the struggle of Britain’s colonial possessions towards independence. The lift hoisted visitors to the shabby offices of great causes. Among them was the Africa Bureau, led with arctic integrity by the ...”

“... to whom he returns or alludes several times. Jack Scruton was born into the lower ranks of the Northern industrial working class: one of eight children, two of whom died in infancy, he grew up in the back streets of Ancoats, child of a Lawrentian marriage between a physical, drunken father and a mother with genteel aspirations. The support of his mother ...”

“... mass base for the national struggle, directly under the aegis of the Church. Mobilisation at home was accompanied by pressure abroad, in the first place on Athens to take up the issue of self-determination in Cyprus at the UN, but also – departing from the traditions of the Church – rallying support from Arab countries in the region. None of this ...”

“... didn’t want to go back, they wanted to go forward, outward, upwards in fact, to an idea of some home that was larger and more spectacular than could easily be imagined. One night our house was robbed. I woke to see one of the boys leaning over my bed, taking a Polaroid camera from the shelf above me. He smiled at me and took the camera for himself. When he ...”

“... in 1963 as secretary for war for lying about his affair with Christine Keeler; and Amber Rudd as home secretary in 2018 during the Windrush scandal for claiming to be ignorant of the government’s immigration targets, although the figures had been sent to her. In Dalton’s case, it was at worst a bit of indiscreet showing off. In Profumo’s case, the lie ...”

“... have taken on a dismal proto-universality. American researchers found British interrogations in Northern Ireland used as at once source and analogue of the behaviour of their own troops, thereby raising some very basic questions. How does knowledge of torture techniques pass from one set of interrogators to another, and why do people choose to apply ...”

“... Northern Ireland, the Basque Country, Corsica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Nagorno-Karabakh: this list of familiar trouble-spots is neither complete nor extended beyond Europe, in which case it would be at least eight times longer. Originally coined to describe the situation in Ireland, ‘troubles’ in this sense have multiplied and become global, notably since 1989 ...”

“... was founded in 1932 the Empire Service had a clear mission: the provision of news and reminders of home to Britons in far-flung parts of the world. During the Second World War too there was a clear purpose, as the corporation rallied to the war effort, not least, in the World Service’s case, by broadcasting coded messages to Allied agents. After the war some ...”

“... and seize their assets. Blair had set aside the lessons of peace-building, so recently learned in Northern Ireland, and embraced the doctrine of counter-insurgency. The shift in the British position, under American pressure, sabotaged European policy. It undermined the EU’s commitment to promoting Palestinian unity by suppressing, at the ...”

“... monument to critical admiration of the country by a foreign scholar. Long-standing occupation of office has not been peculiar to Italy. Swedish social-democracy was in office for more than forty years, Red-Black coalitions in Austria for nearly as ...”

“... edited by Claire Holt. The essay had an unlikely origin. One day, as I was sitting in my office with the door open, two senior professors walked by, chatting loudly on their way to lunch. The man doing most of the talking was Allan Bloom, who much later published a bestseller called The Closing of the American ...”

“... by allowing them to feel ‘the chill of the cold Atlantic air’ as they look up at the starry northern sky from a replica of the promenade deck. They can view hundreds of recovered artefacts, among them ‘little big piece’, the second biggest chunk of the ship ever recovered, and take tours led by actors in period costume ‘portraying actual Titanic ...”

“... is often staggering. She treats being the prime minister’s wife as a sort of high constitutional office. When the Zeppelins raid London, she sends for the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to give her a personal report. When the government is under fire in the newspapers, she instructs the director of the government ...”