“... in the 1780s was Col. Stephen Digby, the Queen’s Vice-Chamberlain.) It is a tribute to Guest’s powers of perceptive analysis that some less promising 18th-century writers can just as usefully illustrate differing tones of exemplary reverence or exhortation, postures of explanatory authority or humility, and varying tensions between private and public ...”

“... his shrewdness and his patience were never in doubt. All of them were shattered by relentless powers against which his talents were quite futile. Listen to Callaghan himself, describing his feelings as he took office as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1964, after Labour had won an election in peacetime conditions, when no one was out of work: ‘In all the ...”

“... in fiction. In Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian, a ‘menacing Arab’ with ‘potent mesmeric powers’ lays a curse on the narrator that results in everyone else in London being wiped out by plague. In Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, which went through 15 editions between 1899 and the First World War, a vengeful giant ...”

“... academic philosophers who have bewitched themselves into a sense of a civilising mission. For Richard Rorty, philosophers’ obsession with such merely mood-enhancing words as Reason, Reality, Truth, Objectivity and Method is little more than the fetishism of an increasingly parochial discipline. If you really want to understand how knowledge is made and ...”

“... Grandma Lu, her father’s mother, and she doesn’t need to be blamed outright to feel punished.Richard Beard’s extraordinary memoir of 2017, The Day That Went Missing, has the same starting point, a brother drowning, apparently within reach of a sibling unable to help. Richard was eleven in 1978, Nicky nine. They were ...”

“... and broken bodies. Domestic peace was coupled with the stirrings of success abroad. Continental powers, which had recoiled in horror at the regicide, now started to recognise the strength, and therefore the diplomatic importance, of their troubled archipelagic neighbour. But the republic went sour again. In 1653 the Rump Parliament was still ...”

“... It plays on the child’s dream of omnipotence – the friend who is equipped with superhuman powers, but who remains dependent. And in its domestication of the superficially repellent, E.T. reflects the vogue for the rubber monsters that were popular toys a few years ago, a vogue now undergoing a revival with the international distribution of ETs in ...”

“... road Hillary Clinton would likely have pursued?Ten years ago, when Iran was the focus of the big powers’ nuclear concerns, I suggested that a deal might be possible whereby ‘Iran would be allowed limited enrichment rights (say, up to 5 per cent enrichment), together with security guarantees and technical help.’* Five per cent is a level of enrichment ...”

“... DeSantis they have extended to criminalising those who oppose them and asserting unprecedented powers in the name of ‘freedom’.I hadn’t heard of the University of South Florida before I applied for the job. During my time there, the administration was desperate to make the university into a brand. Managers obsessed over rankings and over what they ...”

“... in reductio ad Hitlerum as he bears witness to what’s going on in the megachurches: viewers of Richard Dawkins’s documentary The Root of All Evil? might remember his opening salvo against a pre-scandal Ted Haggard, in which Dawkins said that a New Life Church service reminded him of the Nuremberg rallies. (Haggard eventually chased Dawkins out of the ...”

“... perhaps a little ambitious even for Burke. In April 1758, shortly after the birth of his son Richard, he agreed to compile and edit a new periodical to be called the Annual Register in return for a fee of £100 a year. A second son, Christopher, was born in December 1758 and it soon became apparent that Burke’s literary earnings would not suffice to ...”

“... from constituencies with a wide franchise), the machinations of the government were widely known. Richard Carlile, the editor of the Republican, concluded that ‘the ministers have been playing with Thistlewood … they brought the Cato-street affair to maturity, just to answer their purposes for striking terror into the minds of the people on the eve of a ...”

“... his words’. Dr Johnson, an expert fault-finder, found many faults, without doubting the poet’s powers. Indeed the necessary warnings were first expressed by Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson, who loved the man ‘this side idolatry’ – certainly he ‘wanted art’, certainly he could be hasty and careless, but could still be said to be ‘not ...”

“... hostility to eloquence and represented it as compatible with the exercise of reason. Richard Tuck’s essay, on Hobbes’s religion, also brings out differences between Leviathan and the earlier works, which had been less theologically unorthodox and less profoundly anti-clerical. Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since Pocock urged that ...”

“... crimes of the British long after the empire has been abandoned. The latest to join the list are Richard Gott and Partha Chatterjee. Gott, who describes himself as ‘a historian in private practice’, has written a wide-ranging study of resistance to British rule in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, North America and the Antipodes. Some of the longest chapters ...”