“... and won from a sceptical Cabinet. Routledge calls MacGregor a ‘political rhinoceros’. If he means MacGregor was an antediluvian creature who charged brainlessly at his opponents, he is wrong. In Britain, as in most of Western Europe, coal mining was under threat from cheaper sources in the US, India, China and Eastern Europe. Sooner or later, the choice ...”

“... of the art in the sociology and history of psychiatry (one has only to read the later effusions of David Cooper to recognise that some very silly things are said about madness). But it also makes sense in that ample room remains for sceptical doubt about the existence of a set of culturally and historically-transcendent conditions of madness. One feels ...”

“... Nora Nicholson. Nora had had a happy life and was 81 when she died, so the service was by no means a gloomy one. Sybil Thorndyke, herself 92 and crippled by arthritis, sat enthroned in the front pew surrounded by a posse of ladies who were scarcely younger. At a given moment, these attendants slid along the pew, got their frail shoulders under Dame Sybil ...”

“... Love, the heretical sect with which Lipsius was associated and which justified dissimulation as a means of outwitting clerical inquisitors. Renaissance Stoicism, like Familism, was not a philosophy of mere expediency. The changes and chances of war and of confessional rivalry encouraged the belief that permanent values could be located only within the ...”

“... were insights in Wallace’s treatment of divergence which Darwin could turn to advantage. As David Kohn observed in a cogent dismissal of Brackman2, it is first necessary to distinguish between divergence as a purely taxonomic conception and divergence as an explanatory principle, integral to the dynamics of natural selection. Both Darwin and Wallace ...”

“... unlawful – did so ‘spontaneously’, says MacGregor, or orchestrated by MacGregor’s Svengali David Hart, as others say – the new legislation demoralised the union, complicated its affairs, made its leaders look shifty as they tried to evade the sequestrators. But the two main battles owed nothing to it. In the physical battle for control of pits, power ...”

“... of us adopted a proud and sterile form of internal exile, of being at least self-aware in what David Riesman calls ‘the lonely crowd’. While it may be true that there is some honour in refusing the false community on offer, if only for the sake of what Riesman calls the ‘other figures in the landscape – nature itself, the cosmos’, possibly even a ...”

“... officials: a Democrat state assembly member, Alec Brook-Krasny, and a Republican state senator, David Storobin. ‘It took the Greeks two generations to produce one elected politician,’ a local journalist told me proudly. ‘We have two already and they were both born in Russia.’ ‘Russians think they own everything,’ said Bella Rappaport, the woman ...”

“... overwhelming desire to re-establish sovereignty over the peninsula, demilitarised since the Camp David Accords. The extent of the Islamists’ deference to the military was made plain when the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood was forced to retract derogatory remarks he had made about the military’s willingness to bend to the wishes of ...”

“... She hit the big time in the 1970s and has never been remotely precious about her stories, which means she’s told most of them loads of times already, most notably in Lester Bangs’s Blondie (1980) and in Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie (1982), an autobiography ghosted by Victor Bockris but written, supposedly, by Harry herself, in collaboration with ...”

“... and circumstances as you might see them if you were writing a novel, then access becomes a daily means of literary supply, and the task is then to make peace, if you can, between the warring truths that come at you from reality. Lillian invented new and bold ways of doing this by dramatising people’s motives, rather than merely describing them, or by ...”

“... January, they have been managed by a new Task Force Europe, led by Johnson’s chief negotiator, David Frost, a burly, acerbic diplomat, one of the few in the Foreign Office who has always loathed the EU. Frost’s conversations with Michel Barnier have become openly bitter and recriminatory, in a way not seen before. Frost is backed up by contemptuous ...”

“... Oliver’s overtures anyway, for both were committed to parliamentary reform by constitutional means. The government would not understand that, though he had no respect for corrupt figures of authority, Hone had a great deal more respect for the constitution than did the government itself or the judiciary. Over and over again, the crown and the judges ...”

“... campaigns in history’.What strategic bombing does to a city is to produce, by military means, something similar to the massive urban destruction of last year’s earthquakes in Turkey and Syria: mangled pipes and wires, the ganglia of shorn rebars and masonry, homes cut in half, exposing their foundations like uprooted trees. Somehow there seems to ...”