“... much as we do. His subject is Pretending. There are those among us who felt our lives were shaped by the balanced but enigmatic Grant, even as we knew (without understanding properly) that this tanned Mr Lucky, a Beverly Hills rake, had once been Archie Leach, a pale kid from a cold, unhappy home in Bristol.That was the magical cut in his career. It isn’t ...”

“... the Border hills near Beattock on the way to South Uist and Barra. At Oban I’ll rendezvous with David Paterson, a landscape photographer, who’s working with me on a book on the Highland Clearances. As I overtake a worn blue Audi estate, I look sideways and see Dave’s face and grizzled beard. We exchange incoherent signs, pull in a little later on the ...”

“... ensuring that the apparent triumph of freedom over fascism in the Second World War should instead be understood as a defeat. Inspired by its founding father, Friedrich von Hayek, whose rallying call The Road to Serfdom had been published three years earlier, the organisation believed that the price of victory had been too ...”

“... gave a speech in his Sedgefield constituency in which he sought to justify his actions in Iraq by emphasising the unprecedented threat that global terrorism poses to the civilised world. He called this threat ‘real and existential’, and argued that politicians had no choice but to confront it ‘whatever the political cost’. This is because the ...”

“... the Weimar constitution, Articles 17 and 22 of which established that all federal elections should be conducted according to the principle of proportional representation – was such a disaster. What Britain lacks is not a written constitution, but a codified one. Codification – or what King calls ‘Constitutions with a capital C’ – joins all the ...”

“... century, shortly after the Queen’s Hall opened as a new musical venue in 1893. As such, they may be regarded as a classic instance of what is sometimes called ‘invented tradition’, where venerable antiquity is less in evidence than is often popularly supposed; and where change and adaptation are at least as important as continuity and survival, even ...”

“... the Earth’s crust and crystallised into highlands and headlands. It’s rugged country, raked by south-westerlies ‘bred of the Atlantic’ and eaten at by seas surging into the throat of the Channel. Western Europe reaches one of its fine points here, like Cape Wrath in Sutherland, Lleyn and St ...”

“... It’s not​ 1940. Might it, though, be 1945? By that I don’t mean we are at the end of some epic contest of national survival, let alone of national liberation. It’s not been that sort of contest, and anyway, this doesn’t look much like the end. But for the last few years normal politics has effectively been on hold as the government has grappled with a grim and grinding task that has consumed almost all its energies ...”

“... The weight-bearing ideas were conspiracy and co-ordination. ‘Conspiracy’: a conscious plan by two or more parties to commit an act they know to be illegal. ‘Co-ordination’: work performed together. You couldn’t tie Trump’s actions to either activity.The second main finding concerned obstruction of ...”

“... grieved and retaliated. Rather, he lays out the way systematic dispossession was managed, legally, by the class who engineered the process and who did so for their own gain. The justices of the peace, judges and estate factors made money and entrenched their own power by robbing thousands of small farmers – peasants, if ...”

“... list. But most of their work has dealt primarily with sex as a set of relationships defined by the biological differences between men and women, rather than with gender, which involves the perception and social construction of those differences. And as Peter Burke points out in his foreword to this short but intriguing book, even historians of gender ...”

“... Admittedly, the latter is more difficult, but the difficulties are made greater than they need be by a failure to seek entry to the scientific realm by the most appropriate and accessible route. That route is the one which the main mass of the Victorians had the good sense to use but which in more recent years has ...”

“... is at first ‘of excellent discourse’ but later is a devil. Nothing is as it seems; nothing can be accurately labelled. And if nothing can be identified, identity and the ability to distinguish between different identities is nothing. This may represent an ideal of Shakespeare’s, who was the father of twins, though of ...”

“... of Democrats and, most potent of all, immigration and the wall with Mexico. The pieces can be juggled almost at random. Still, the apparent evacuation of Syria was major news, and it hogged the headlines very satisfactorily. It was, he said on Twitter, ‘time for us to get out’ and let others ‘figure the situation out’. Believers might see this ...”

“... possibly none. It is hard to think of anything to say which is not being said somewhere else by people you’d prefer not to associate with. Still, here is a question I have not seen posed elsewhere: why did not one Tory MP abstain from the vote of confidence in Theresa May? The whole process felt a little uncanny. The poll was triggered in secret one ...”