“... Dr Richard Barter, who got the measure of cholera twenty years before the more famous physician John Snow. The rising generation of British officials had a special reverence for the Arabs of the desert, with their ‘wild independence’ and ‘manly frankness’. Alliances with the Wahhabi were mooted seventy years before the explorer Captain 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Historicism and Cultural Materialism are enterprises which, as products of our Western European or North American presuppositions, prove to be as blindly culture-specific as the societies they describe.’ He is rightly cheerful about this prospect of his own occultation; it is a fate which, like death, he will share with us all. But he hopes that, unlike most ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... motorways which currently criss-cross pastoral England. One would have to go back to the days of John Buchan to find an English fictional hero capable of squeezing so much fun out of driving a car. Should Cullen blow the gaff on Lord Moggerhanger’s exploits? And could the British social fabric survive their exposure? Life goes on has a plot which hinges on ...”

“... and school and family discipline, and her pledges to reform the trade unions, all went down well north of the Trent. Hall likes to call this ‘authoritarian populism’, by which he appears to mean a kind of constitutional fascism by consent, but to me it is much more recognisable as the small-town, shopkeeper conservativism amid which I grew up not long ...”

“... Johnston, William McGrath, Carl Schorske, Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, Andrew Whiteside and John Boyer testify.* There are a number of plausible reasons for this. The first and most obvious is the great diaspora of Central European scholars brought about by the rise of Nazism in the 1930s – though some intellectuals, like Wittgenstein and ...”

“... way, but holding the balance scrupulously steady.’ For ‘English’, we may substitute ‘North Americans’, and for ‘Scots’, ‘Irish’. Likewise, if Mr Moore’s presentation of Mangan is, like Scott’s presentation of Waverley, ‘a strong portrait of a weak or weakish character’, the perceptive critic has brought out what the strength is ...”

“... he will be away when his wife is seriously ill, in many ways he is a more significant figure in North than in South Britain, but he will go. Boswell had been powerfully drawn by London all his life. To be about to succumb to this pull, against all advice, marks him as unwise rather than selfish. By the standards created by the opportunities for selfishness ...”

“... places on the difficulty of travel by bad roads between Solorgues and Langlade – about three km north of Solorgues – where the powerful Sestier resides. Le Roy Ladurie, in his explication de texte, compares Sestier in Langlade to the King who lives in the almost equally distant Paris, whence, as the dictons of the region tell us, ‘neither good wind nor ...”

“... included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by Stafford Cripps on his ...”