“... Decision, which was taken to have outlawed slavery on English soil. In 1787, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce began their campaign against the slave trade. Parliament eventually voted to end the trade in 1807; the United States followed suit in 1808. Slavery in the British West Indies was abolished in 1834, and even the tenacious slave system of the ...”

“... of whether Rhodes was justified in his obsession with ‘expansion’ has long gone stale. William Kelleher Storey’s new Life turns our attention from Rhodes the visionary to the ruthless coloniser, who often pitted himself against imperial officialdom and its watery idealism. He is interested mainly in the persistence with which Rhodes created ...”

“... Working Aristocracy’, ‘the Unworking Aristocracy’, ‘Captains of Industry’, ‘Cash-Nexus’, ‘Cant’, ‘Machinery’, ‘the Condition of England Question’, ‘the Everlasting No’, ‘Hero-Worship’, ‘the Dismal Science’. Although it gravitates naturally towards radical conservatism, Carlylism can also be discerned at work ...”

“... Melmotte. Even Disraeli reckoned that capitalism of the sort that came to Britain with William of Orange (‘Dutch finance’) was detestable: it had resulted in ‘the degradation of a fettered and burthened multitude … made debt a national habit … credit the ruling power … introduced a loose, inexact, haphazard and dishonest spirit in the ...”

“... fainthearted witnessed a system so exultant and impregnable that it only just managed to keep the cash machines open on the high streets. Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the Bolshevik revolution, remains broadly committed to the Marxist camp – a fact worth mentioning as it would be easy to read this book without realising it. This is because of ...”

“... financiers of the day, including Godolphin, and benefited from the fact that her income was in cash at a time when interest rates were unusually high. She held a diverse portfolio, mixing treasury notes with East India Company and Bank of England stock, and had access to what today might be called insider information – though the markets were not nearly ...”

“... nearest to hand: all the intolerant voters in the woodwork. This is our Naked Lunch, then – in William Burroughs’s words, ‘a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork’. Like the Trump voter, perhaps, we can only yearn to go back to a never-was. Yet we’re galvanised. Like all good citizens – though few of us have been these ...”

“... As a survey of Waugh’s career this collection is less balanced than William Cook’s anthology of 2010, Kiss Me, Chudleigh, the World According to Auberon Waugh. Attallah, who is chairman of Quartet Books and who bankrolled the Review and Ingrams’s magazine the Oldie for many years, is not unreasonably concerned to focus on his ...”

“... to the crowd at a John Lewis sale, and similar remarks were made about the Iraq War protests. William Morris, a leading figure in the SDF, was issued with a summons for obstruction in July 1886, six years after his firm had been commissioned to decorate the throne room at St James’s Palace. In a demonstration on the afternoon of 1 March ...”

“... Court judge, promised an ‘open and fearless’ investigation. In 2013 the foreign secretary, William Hague, made an application for ‘public interest immunity’ – which meant that the government’s classified files on Litvinenko wouldn’t be available to the inquest and that Owen’s freedom to investigate was severely restricted. ‘The British ...”

“... by political disagreements, Taylor, a known and convinced Tory and devotee of the prime minister, William Pitt, managed to remain on friendly terms with men such as William Godwin and the great satirical poet John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar’, whom Pitt’s government regarded as dangerously disloyal.Friendship was his true ...”

“... of the young painter’s visits to the brothels of Barcelona. ‘Where the boy found the cash for prostitutes is a mystery. His pocket money would not have sufficed. Did other friends like Pallares treat him to the occasional girl, or were his boyish charms such that the motherly whores did not charge him’? This is a reasonable ...”

“... who did need it. Grace’s pre-eminence had, it’s true, a trickle-down effect, bringing more cash and hence more professional players into the game, but resentment understandably remained at how little they got, compared with him and with other, lesser ‘shamateurs’. When, in the winter of 1873-4, Grace went on the first of his two tours of ...”

“... 1880s, boasting that with a hundred men he could excavate it in a week. But in the end, Evans’s cash up-front, and his persistence in dealing with the various local landowners, won out. Excavations began in 1900 and within weeks the famous ‘throne’ had been discovered in its ‘throne room’, complete with ‘bathing pool’ (or ‘lustral basin’ or ...”

“... Richardson resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s order to fire Cox; Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, followed. Eventually Robert Bork, the solicitor-general and next in the chain of command at Justice, sacked Cox. Ziegler announced the abolition of the special prosecutor’s office. But the public outcry at the ‘Saturday Night ...”