“... My daughter and I voted early. It was the most simple ballot-paper on earth, but still, I was so nervous I had to check and recheck, making sure the X was going in the right box. Zinging with anxiety, we drove down to Edinburgh on Thursday evening to watch the results with friends in Marchmont. ‘Yes’ posters again well outnumbered ‘No’. The ...”

“... between agricultural slumps. The primary concern of a large tenant farmer like Street’s father wasn’t the bottom line: ‘One didn’t farm for cash profits, but did one’s duty by the land.’ In 1911 the Streets had a row. It’s a common pattern in the agricultural ...”

“... not justice. The wonder is not that governments fall far short of their ambitions, but that they so often succeed in maintaining good order and allowing their citizens to look after themselves in peace. Idealists have retorted that human nature is what it is only because our institutions are corrupt; the state can play much more than a defensive role. In ...”

“... he started by asking: ‘Are you a writer who became a politician, rather than a politician who’s done some writing?’ ‘Great question,’ Obama replied.What else might he have been? A law professor, of course, but also a CEO, a diplomat, maybe even an entertainer. As well as being one of the smartest people ever to enter the White House, Obama was also ...”

“... all its connotations of reckless expenditure of time and money. Accumulate, accumulate! – that’s my motto, whether it’s publications, index cards, or those flimsier bits of paper that promise to pay the bearer so many pounds if he presents them to the Bank of ...”

“... the importance of living up to his good intentions: Putting Iraq to rights, in Mr Blair’s view, should be the whole world’s business. The more that all nations make common cause to do this, the better. The less this happens, the more vital it is to balance any absence of common cause with a sense of equitable ...”

“... American flag’); but the year is 2002, and the song is ‘Talkin’ Al Kida Blues’ (‘Cuba’s our enemy, unless we need a prison camp’). Al Kida is the name of a man who lives ‘somewhere in Cleveland’: ‘He’s freaking out.’ The singer’s name is Dan Bern. His parents ...”

“... In​ Mrs Flanigan’s Antigua and the Antiguans, published in 1844, we are told about a plantation overseer who acted against pilfering slaves. His rigourcaused him to be disliked, and determined one among them, more heartless, perhaps, than the rest, to undertake his destruction. On Christmas day, Mr Brown rode to … a neighbouring estate, and upon his return in the evening … he met with his untimely death ...”

“... The exhibition at the National Gallery of Ingres’s portraits is both lavish and comprehensive. It also insists that you come to a conclusion about him. To be offered something as complete as this and not sort out your ideas would be slovenly. Which is not to say that it’s easy ...”

“... A new you! This is supposed to be the time for self-improvement, which makes me wonder what’s gone wrong for 2015. We’re used to the newspaper supplements’ December/January yadda-yadda of diets and get-fit-quick schemes, to the cultural roundups of the year ahead. The steady increase in all this stuff – the annual binge – is one of the more ...”

“... late 1990s. Naseem is from Yemen and spent time with Rania at the Golborne and Maxilla Children’s Centre, a nursery their children attended. Melanie Coles, one of the workers there, remembers how much Fethia missed her father when he was away. Rania was always making cakes and bringing them in for the staff and she got to know the other young mothers. As ...”

“... his faintly saturnine presence should be air-brushed out of any contemporary history of Britain’s third party. The man who at one moment seemed set to inherit the mantle of Lloyd George became instead a kind of gruesome ghost haunting any Liberal feast. The reason was quite simple. In the days when such things were hardly spoken of, Thorpe was accused ...”

“... Parliament in 1998, this building no longer houses the only legislature in Britain. Westminster’s altered position in the wake of devolution has contributed to something even more significant: the reduced force of a once powerful British ‘constitutive story’ that stressed the polity’s superior constitutional ...”

“... the hobnailed boot can be wielded with just as much delicacy and skill as the épée, once said of David Owen that the Good Fairy who attended his birth had generously bestowed upon him the three qualities of charm, intelligence and good looks. He is then reported to have added: ‘What a pity that the Bad Fairy made him a shit.’ This is a pretty cruel thing ...”

“... the Gare du Nord; Great Expectations would whet the appetites of Scottish tyros arriving at King’s Cross. Edinburgh is a literary city. Its architecture and atmosphere are still rich in hints of the life savoured by its great authors, from Dunbar to Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch. The heyday of its literary, cultural and philosophic life lasted for a ...”