“... When future historians come to write about the 1983 General Election, these two books will be essential reading. One is a thorough compilation of the evidence, and the other a brilliant line drawing of a maverick who streaked dramatically across the scene causing all heads to turn and significantly affecting the outcome ...”

“... depart before having ‘his revenge – pouring out an incessant flow of reminiscence which might be amusing were it crisp and to the point but every sentence is expanded and every trifling incident magnified, until dear good Austen begins to rank as a first-class bore – he is so insistent as to be a positive ...”

“... the Clapham Road – hence, I suppose, the locking and timing devices. No doubt there’s much to be said, and not all of it simply wishful, about working-class energies, the fruitful mixing of cultures, the melding of black and white. What strikes the visiting eye is the squalor and the distress. Flying to London from New Zealand, you spend 24 hours in the ...”

“... it is the American method of teaching history, and not least their own history, coupled with the by no means uncommon requirement that students purchase copies of designated books, that has generated such an enormous demand for the general text, a demand which American historians and publishers alike have long been eager to satisfy. This is a perfectly ...”

“... as the last haven of free choice in an increasingly bureaucratised society, an ultimate redoubt to be defended at all costs against the assault of the social sciences. ‘The secrecy of the ballot, the pencilled cross in the secluded polling booth’, was, he said, ‘the great eleusinian mystery of the democratic state. It must ...”

“... ourselves why the subject recurs like this? What is the actual policy in Britain? And what could be done? The civil defence cycle is principally an American phenomenon. It is part and parcel of the struggle between those who are moderate and those who are extremist over the conduct of nuclear deterrence and the arms race. The extremist position is that for ...”

“... long thought someone ought to tackle: a fearless update of New Grub Street. The job wouldn’t be too taxing – indeed, in many cases, it would be all too easy to attach contemporary names to Gissing’s sunken literary types: his principled dullards as well as his sleek chancers. And then there are the grim trappings ...”

“... ancient ‘quantity theory of money’ which, two centuries after it was so elegantly spelt out by David Hume and a century after it was translated into snappy but empty symbols – MV = PT – by Irving Fisher, is still the basis of so much analysis of inflation. As Sir Ian says, ‘old doctrines never die: in ...”

“... Lawrence was attracted to Arabia by what he called ‘the Arab gospel of bareness’, as well as by his desire to play the Middle East version of the Great Game. The present generation of adventurers are simply there for the money. The doctors and nurses, teachers and businessmen, truck-drivers and skilled workers who flock to ‘Saudi’ in search of markets or higher incomes would be the last people to dress up in Arab costume or to subject themselves to the austere rules of the desert ...”

“... days that followed much was done to pursue the ‘softly softly’ approach preferred, not just by British police tradition, but by the anti-terrorist squads of the last decade. As the terrorists’ identity – Arabs from the Iranian south-western region of Khuzestan – and their goals – autonomy for the homeland they ...”

“... with its economic misfortunes. Yet the most esteemed theorist of economic recovery seems to be the early 19th-century French populariser of Adam Smith known to Marx as ‘the inane Jean-Baptiste Say … [who] refutes himself again’. The most successful recent guide to the economy – a work called Wealth and Poverty, described ...”

“... Sutcliffe, but to understand ourselves. Such help is at hand in a historical work, published by chance during the trial. Roger Smith’s history of the conflict between medical and legal discourses in the insanity trials of the 19th century is ‘relevant’ in a way he could never have anticipated or, in this tragic instance, have wished. His book is ...”

“... Carlyle, already the translator of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, was invited by Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, to ‘Germanise the public’. Jeffrey issued the invitation cautiously, even negatively, asking Carlyle to temper his enthusiasm for ‘your German divinities’ – an enthusiasm he could scarcely understand, let ...”

“... of the ‘radical right’. The events of October and early November 1956 in Hungary do not, by common consent of the historians who have looked at them, provide a clear case for saying that this was an uprising or a reform movement, or for offering any other single definition. They do not compare easily with the Prague Spring, or even the Polish ...”

“... Isherwood knew. In June 1849 Edward Leeves, an elderly expatriate, driven out of Venice by the Austrian bombardment, made his way to London. There he met Jack Brand, a trooper in the Blues. A month later Leeves went to Scotland to stay with the Queensberrys having fixed with Jack a day to meet on his return. Jack never showed up. He had died that ...”