“... politics and population. But what of the navy and the world beyond Britain? Here Rodger takes a strong and contentious line. Before 1815, he insists, the navy was not primarily an engine of expanding British empire and aggression. Its main raison d’être was defensive, and it was powered more than anything else by fear, and indirectly by ...”

“... Richet and Paul Portier in 1902. Von Pirquet won. The linking evidence has turned out to be very strong. And although Nobel Prizes were awarded to Behring (in 1901) and Richet (in 1913) for their immunological researches, their terms, unlike ‘allergy’, remained scientific and technical. What makes a malady modern? Some define themselves as such because ...”

“... the places they had seen.Dalrymple calls all this the ‘Indosphere’, attributing the coinage to Simon Sebag Montefiore (elsewhere it is attributed to Professor James Matisoff, a celebrated coiner of neologisms). But however we wish to describe it, the phenomenon is achieved, if not quite without firing a shot, at least without the deployment of huge armies ...”

“... many times over, in the town where I grew up. Those engines were new in the 1970s. Unlike Simon Bradley I lack the trainspotter’s enthusiasm for locomotives, and I’ve had some horrible journeys on that train. But the theatrical grandeur of its arrival always alters my sense of my surroundings, as if a door had opened, offering a glimpse of an ...”

“... the broadcasting licence of Radio Caracas Televisión, forcing it off the air and prompting a strong rebuke from Human Rights Watch and the US State Department. In subsequent years, Chávez came to adopt all the attributes political scientists associate with authoritarianism. He sacrificed institutional checks and balances for political ...”

“... conditions – conditions which have now disappeared. We have had the woe-is-England vapourings of Simon Heffer and the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic industry has flourished. Now both Weight and Robert Colls have written requiems for the old Britishness which are also ruminations on a new, more democratic England. Britannia, for so long a ...”

“... bridge the train is crossing has always been assumed to be the railway bridge at Maidenhead. Lady Simon said she had been in the same compartment as Turner on a Great Western train from Exeter to London, and he told her that Rain, Steam and Speed was realised after he put his head out of the window of a train as it passed over the Thames at Maidenhead. As the ...”

“... are rather sketchily integrated into the whole. On the post-1979 ‘establishment’ Jones is very strong indeed. The outriders are given their full significance in providing the ideas needed by the ruling class in the crisis of the 1970s, and in sustaining it ever since. From the mandarin Mont Pelerin Society to the would-be demotic ...”

“... if that is what she is telling, seems to have been that her inclinations were simply not very strong. Such a deficiency, if deficiency it is, brought with it at least one unarguable benefit. She was without jealousy. Duff spent his whole married life running after, and usually catching up with, every presentable female in the area. Diana either turned a ...”

“... bathes his feet with her tears, dries them with her hair and then anoints them with precious oils. Simon the Pharisee reproves Jesus for allowing her to touch him: ‘She is a sinner,’ he says. In response, Jesus absolves her: ‘Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.’ These many sins have long been assumed to be sexual, and the jar ...”

“... manipulation of the Old, in this case Jesus’s appeal to the Creation stones to support his strong stand against divorce (Mark 10.6ff): ‘From the beginning of the creation God made them male and female [= Gen. 1.27]. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh ...”

“... dead. The sequence takes the form of a series of meetings with ‘familiar ghosts’. There’s Simon Sweeney, ‘an old Sabbath-breaker’ who urges him to ‘Stay clear of all processions!’ Heaney is nonetheless drawn into the trail of pilgrims for the island. On the way he meets the shade of Carleton:‘We are earthworms of the earth, and all thathas ...”

“... certain optimism, even in a more cynical character. Cynicism is not one of Lord Redcliffe-Maud’s strong points: it is indeed one for which one could not give him more than a gamma marking, as compared with other members of his class, but this defect has perhaps made him more rather than less suitable for public display. For Lord Redcliffe-Maud ...”

“... and Oman remained British protectorates, their currencies pegged to sterling. Wearing makes a strong case that it was the cost of the military ‘protection’ of the Gulf that forced the end of Britain’s formal empire there in 1971, and the beginning of US hegemony. Before withdrawing from its dependencies, the British government placed retired ...”

“... Raine, who, one is reminded, does this kind of thing best. Raine also overshadows the work of Simon Rae, perhaps the least distinct of these poets in individual style: the actual machinery is efficient, but seems directed to no particular end. Wendy Cope makes fun of this and other fashionable modes in a series of ‘Strugnell’ poems – works of a ...”