“... office. For twenty years after 1846, Liberal government was kept on the road not just by Lord John Russell and Palmerston but by their two most reliable and businesslike cabinet supporters: Sir George Grey, Charles’s nephew, and Sir Charles Wood, Charles’s son-in-law. Commentators fond of political flamboyance considered both men dispensable, but ...”

“... his younger brother Hamo at Gallipoli and his beloved ‘poor Tommy’, his fellow Welch Fusilier David Thomas – nourished his Homeric rage, which, in a uniquely Sassoonian way, led him to take the whole burden of war on himself as a kind of cosmic personal insult:I want to smash someone’s skull; I want to have a scrap and get out of the war for a bit or ...”

“... Blackheath, the list of architects’ self-designed houses is long: Peter Moro, Brian Meeking, David Branch (whose elegant, Miesian case study-style house has now been demolished), Leo Rubinstein, Paul Tvrtkovic, Ray Smith and Ronald Coleman. Most of these were deadpan little houses, in brick with exposed concrete frames, often with small windows onto the ...”

“... debatable. It’s a shocking story, with one of the victims having been battered almost to death. David Cameron is quick to move in and claim the crime is evidence of ‘a broken society’, conveniently ignoring the fact that Edlington, the village in question, is smack in the middle of what was a mining community, a society systematically broken by Mrs ...”

“... in 1901-11, might be regarded as a ‘beneficent visitation’. His Bloomsbury associate Bertrand Russell observed that, while a falling birth-rate had ‘destroyed the importance of [Malthus’s] theory so far as the white races are concerned … in Asia it remains important’. A new sorting of the too many and the too few appeared during the Cold War, when ...”

“... Guided at times by Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner and David Brion Davis conceived slavery as a mode of organising labour, as well as a system of racial domination. This led to the recognition that advocates of ‘free labour’ had economic as well as humanitarian reasons for opposing slavery, and that the Northern ...”

“... house. Within hours of her murder Tony Blair spoke of it as ‘a disgusting act of barbarity’. David Andrews, the Irish Foreign Minister, said that it was ‘clearly designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few of them threw petrol bombs at ...”

“... The serenity treats religion as if it were, almost self-evidently, nonsense – think of Stendhal, Russell, even Hume. For Stendhal, the priests are hypocrites, therefore religion is a lot of hypocritical nonsense. Nietzsche is the great wild exception to this, and Camus the great calm exception: both, in their intense dismantling, meet the true challenge of ...”

“... the errant young man from the Singapore Stock Exchange, is interviewed in his Frankfurt prison by David Frost, the interview, made by Frost’s production company, broadcast by the BBC at ten this evening. The papers, which have had a preview, are full of Leeson’s self-justifications, but nobody seems to question the propriety of broadcasting such an ...”

“... the late-night conversations between LBJ and that old reactionary shellback, Senator Richard Russell, and to hear the two of them saying that this Vietnam War sure is a stupid proposition, and that it’s high time to recognise ‘Red China’ – except who wants to be called a Commie sympathiser not just by Dick Nixon but by Bobby Kennedy?) Yet at ...”

“... Robin Hood is a programme of the left. Robin Hood is Jeremy Corbyn. He’s Russell Brand. He’s Hugo Chávez. So it used to seem. But a change has come about. The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the myth to their advantage. In this version of Robin Hood the traditional poor – the ...”

“... meetings were hugely popular during their visits to Britain in the 1870s and 1880s, leading David Bebbington to make the startling claim that ‘Moody and Sankey probably represent the chief cultural influence of the United States on Britain during the 19th century.’ Of course, if one really took seriously the criterion about having ‘in some way ...”

“... Rouault and Modigliani. Bacon’s next ambitious work was called Wound for a Crucifixion. John Russell described it as being ‘set in a hospital ward … On a sculptor’s armature was a large section of human flesh: a specimen wound.’ It didn’t sell, so Bacon took it home and destroyed it, something he would continue to do throughout his life. This ...”

“... of a Palestinian homeland since, despite the commitments, muffled as they are, of the Camp David accords, no such idea has as yet managed to find an enabling vocabulary within what is considered “reasonable” political discourse in this country.’ What needs to be added to Poirier’s astute comments is that the ‘idea’ of a Palestinian homeland ...”

“... by Mrs Thatcher but now wholly outmoded.24 October. Judy Egerton sends me Among Booksellers by David Batterham. Batterham is a second-hand bookseller and the book a collection of letters to Howard Hodgkin from the places, some of them quite far-flung, where book-buying has taken him. There are letters from Spain, Finland, provincial France and even ...”