“... referred to as ‘our own people’, but to represent them more effectively. A journey back to her home town of Grantham is inescapable at this point. The Path to Power conveys the provincial ambit of Thatcher’s early life, with a self-awareness that avoids affectation. She always remained the daughter of Councillor Alfred Roberts, proprietor of a ...”

“... in my Kevlar. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think: “They hit us at home and now it’s our turn.”’ I heard about Hashim, a fat, ‘painfully shy’ 15-year-old, who liked to sit for hours by the river with his birdcage, and who was shot by the 4th Infantry Division in a raid on his village. Asked about the details of the ...”

“... guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in schools’ – a necessary move, according to Lord Nash, the schools minister, ‘to improve safeguarding and … strengthen the barriers to extremism’. The British values to be promoted are defined as ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance for those of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... carry that culture.’ ‘The crux’ is how to make use ‘of the talents of our people here at home. There is a ... drive ... to learn and improve, but the energy has dissipated in internal attrition.’ ‘We have lost our spirit of enquiry, our spirit of freedom.’ ‘What we say is not real.’ ‘People simply do not trust each other any ...”

“... of the hemisphere. In the first novel it was the military; in the second, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord, it was narcoterrorism. In The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman the threat comes from the Catholic Church – more specifically, a bloody Crusade launched by the mad cardinal of the title. As before, the town is saved from destruction by the heroic ...”

“... it might have survived. Though it smacked of Maytime in Mayfair, it was a lot more than just a home-grown New Yorker and there was no real competition from Punch, which it far outstripped in its writing. As with the New Yorker before it got fat, Night and Day’s strength was in its departments. The personnel sounds like a dream roster, an all-time ...”

“... consists in missing the main point. (The contrast between Mr Rhodes James’s tender handling of Lord Randolph Churchill and the brusque treatment that statesman suffered at the hands of Roy Foster comes irresistibly to mind.) Albert liked Peel not only for his high seriousness, sense of public duty and moral commitment to the welfare of the mass of the ...”

“... judged Bishop Aylmer by, the letter he wrote to the future Earl of Leicester in 1559: ‘Good my Lord, if the deanery of Winchester be not already swallowed up, let me among the rest of the small fishes have a snatch at the bait. If it be gone, I beseech your good lordship cast a hook for the deanery of Durham.’ What mattered was not how bishops obtained ...”

“... Browne was a Laudian of the speculative, eirenic strain, akin in spirit to the intellectuals of Lord Falkland’s Great Tew Circle. The eirenic tendency – ‘I never could divide my selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion,’ Browne writes – might look apolitical, but when push came to shove in 1642 such persons inclined to the king. During ...”

“... Blair could be pretty confident that his luck would hold. He knew, as we all know now, that Lord Hutton’s wheel was tilted heavily the government’s way. It was Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke of the BBC, foolishly trying to play Blair at his own game, who bet the farm, and lost. This risk-averse, high-stakes strategy is one of the things that set Blair ...”

“... around has always been precarious. In June 1652 Katherine Singard told of walking eight miles home to Great Budworth, Cheshire, carrying a sack of meal on her head. She stopped off in an alehouse to ‘beg some small drink’. The Experience of Work is valuable precisely because it offers a view of the early modern economy that isn’t defined by ...”

“... Blunt’s phrase, with whom, it seems, members of the British upper crust felt peculiarly at home. In her detailed account of four Victorian orientalist writers – Burton, Palgrave, Blunt and Doughty – she follows the emergence of this literary archetype and its Anglo-Saxon complement: the wandering Englishman uniquely qualified to ...”

“... batch of letters she had saved from the flames to her grand-niece, Lady Knatchbull, whose son, Lord Brabourne, had them published – like precious relics – in 1884. A number of other letters have surfaced since then; the great Austen scholar, R.W. Chapman, issued the first modern edition of the correspondence in 1932. Still, only 161 Austen letters are ...”

“... of Seeing Things (1991) came out of bruising rounds of academic labour and the hurly-burly of home life. Even the cottage in Glanmore became a problem as Heaney’s family grew and grew up. To one of his touchiest correspondents, the poet John Montague, he confessed in 1976: ‘I’m in a furious mess over the housing question. This place is a hellhole ...”