“... turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly ...”

“... perjury in 1999 he has written books about himself and other public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special counsel Charles Colson, and John Newton, the Anglican hymn-writer who once captained slave ships. Nazarbayev’s life story doesn’t have this trajectory. It is 19 years since he became his republic’s leader and his rise has ...”

“... and the London Waste Ltd plant in particular, was investigated by the television journalist Richard Watson for Newsnight. A predictable story of fudging, economy with the truth, buck-passing and ministerial denial. Until August 2000, London Waste was guilty of mixing relatively safe bottom ash with the contaminated fly ash that the process was ...”

“... coalitions, heavily subsidising the armies of her allies. Yet between 1788 and 1811 British pig-iron production multiplied by five. By the latter year more than 30 per cent of the British labour force was employed in manufacturing, mining and industry, and Britain’s industrial strength was a vital element in the alliance. Napoleon himself would probably ...”

“... some recent scepticism. New attention has been paid to the political ambiguity of the class, and Richard Hamilton has argued that the Nazi electoral base owed less to the petty-bourgeoisie and more to the bourgeoisie proper than previously assumed. He analysed electoral districts and also made imaginative use of voting returns from fashionable holiday ...”

“... wide philosophical interest. In clarifying the distinction between the selfish gene hypothesis of Richard Dawkins and the selfish DNA hypothesis of Francis Crick, he is led into an enlightening discussion of biological reductionism. The Darwinism of Dawkins is thoroughly reductionist, in the sense that bodies are merely temporary containers for their selfish ...”

“... Ladd-Taylor and Umansky – wrote into law many of the recommendations made by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in their book The Bell Curve, in which they charged that single motherhood correlates positively with child poverty and crime, and urged that welfare benefits be taken away as a disincentive to further childbearing. ‘While more affluent women ...”

“... have benefited most from the First and Second World Wars not taking place, but such is history’s iron law of unintended consequences. Curiously, Brooke pauses halfway through his own massive defence of George to sketch a very similar scenario, in which America becomes part of the Commonwealth and there is no First World War, no Hitler or Stalin. But unlike ...”

“... But this is wrong. The word ‘physical’ is what is known as a ‘natural-kind’ term (like ‘iron’ or ‘water’), albeit of a highly general sort, and it’s generally allowed that we can be very wrong about the nature of anything denoted by a natural-kind term. So we may be very wrong about the physical. We can’t be sure we know the nature and ...”

“... serving mostly as an intelligence officer in Austria, where he debriefed refugees from behind the Iron Curtain. In 1952, he went to Lincoln College, Oxford to study modern languages. Again, he spied on his fellow students and friends, this time for MI5, adopting a ‘left-wing persona’ in order to identify the Burgesses and Macleans of the future. He ...”

“... This may seem a back-handed way of paying tribute to the work of George Peden, whose iron-clad research in the public records has established him as the leading authority on the 20th-century Treasury, which long served as the butt of much of Keynes’s criticism of British economic policy. Nobody has documented its activities more authoritatively ...”

“... power for so long, the ‘sanctuaries’ Koizumi has never specified could only mean the cosy ‘iron triangles’ of powerful bureaucrats, hungry LDP politicians and the businessmen who court official favours, cash in hand. Koizumi was thus attempting the impossible – running against his own party, the one that had nurtured three generations of ...”

“... as in Sheffield, a Labour MP (Martin Flannery) married to a Communist wife, and a young engineer (Richard Caborn) who, doubtless under the patronage of his CP father and predecessor, began as a shop-stewards’ convenor at Firth Brown Tools at the age of 24, then modulated into a Kinnockite MP and, since 1997, government minister. South Wales, where ...”

“... be amusing as well as alarming. The Late Lancashire Witches, a play of 1634 by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, was both subversive comedy and topical commentary. In each case, the witches are female, their bodies corruptible, their passions unbridled. They mock and menace patriarchal political order (in The Late Lancashire Witches a codpiece is bewitched to ...”

“... the greatest threat to the theatres was fire, and the new Drury Lane incorporated the first iron safety curtain, despite which it burned down in 1809. Sheridan, knowing he was ruined, watched from the pavement, drink in hand, remarking to a quizzical passer-by that a man could surely enjoy a glass of wine by his own fireside. He had also been, in a ...”