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“... presented as the originator of English Parliamentary freedom, may well, it now seems (the matter is under much scholarly debate), have been following French ideas. The very idea of Parliament’s Englishness, in fact, is one of the myths which the European Davies seeks to wrest from the Anglocentric Victorians, who regarded the imperial triumphs of ...”

“... this century, both ‘masters of spin’, have had much claim to democratic plausibility. One was Herbert Morrison, Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, now best remembered for the Festival of Britain. Well before then he ran the LCC in the Thirties, presiding over a coalition of trades-unionists and educated Hampstead women with Blairite discipline and ...”

“... searching scrutiny. There are many stilted passages in the Voice series (e.g. when Orwell turns to Herbert Read and asks, ‘Read, will you read us a bit of your autobiography’) and – a black-mark for a talks producer – he allows L.A.G. Strong to use ‘infer’ when he means ‘imply’. Above all else, broadcasting brought Orwell into contact with a ...”

“... effective at getting the Charter amended than were other spokesmen of the minor powers, such as Herbert Evatt of Australia, who tried to increase the role of the General Assembly, where every country, however weak or strong, had only one vote. It was pressure from the Latin American bloc that had inserted not only the provision for regional security pacts ...”

“... we know Time’s but a golden wind that shakes the grass. In its vague uplift this is close to Herbert Asquith’s poem of 1915 about the ‘Volunteer’ who is rescued from a life of humdrum clerking and who in death is described as having his lance ‘broken in life’s tournament’. War is a chivalric affair: although in ‘The Prince of ...”

“... left of the liberals he had already invited – his suggestions included Orwell, G.D.H. Cole and Herbert Read. If Hayek wanted to unite individualist humanitarians against the collectivist threat, Popper advised, he must extend an olive branch to the defenders of interventionism: those who wanted to cure society’s ills by increasing social equality through ...”

“... possibility of a Nazi-Soviet pact two years before the event. Since all the positions she took, no matter how controversial at the time, have been thoroughly vindicated by history, reading about Rathbone makes you feel that her moral and political instincts were those of a contemporary. Yet she belongs to a long vanished world. The daughter of a prosperous ...”

“... It was Wolff who procured for her a forged version of Koch’s identity card, through his cousin Herbert Koebner, a former director of a dental clinic now operating a clandestine family forgery business. Jalowicz still had to get a passport, a visa and a train ticket: things that were ‘hard to procure in the middle of the war’. Koebner’s plan was that ...”

“... his Labour Party work brought him into contact with grandees such as Clement Attlee and Herbert Morrison, Baron was also carrying out instructions that ultimately came from the Comintern in Moscow. He travelled to Paris to deliver messages to Spanish communists in hiding and visited party meetings around the UK to give instructions to local ...”

“... Allies and the subsequent occupation of Rome by German forces, Heinrich Himmler sent an order to Herbert Kappler, head of the SS in the capital city: ‘All Jews,’ it said, ‘without regard to nationality, age, sex or condition, must be transferred to Germany and liquidated there.’ On 16 October, SS officers, armed with addresses for Rome’s ...”

“... had narrow interests and commerce that arts graduates were innumerate. Not even to refer to this matter is curious. The Robbins Report in 1963, says Brooke, ‘spoke harsh things to Oxford and Cambridge and told them to set their house in order’. He does not say why. One reason was that they resisted requests to integrate themselves into a system of higher ...”

“... for Europe. His America is a country without persons – not one is introduced – and for that matter without people, these having been absorbed into his theories of hyperreality and simulation. Seventeen thousand runners in the New York Marathon move him to tears because, ‘collectively, they might seem to be bringing the message of catastrophe for the ...”

“... of fashion. Shakespeare would have thought of the rewrite as ‘a pretty specialised assignment, a matter, indeed, of trying to satisfy audiences who demanded a Revenge play and then laughed when it was provided’. Still, he carried on.I think he did not see how to resolve this problem at the committee meeting, when the agile Bard was voted to carry the ...”

“... that his story shall have no point beyond itself, it is natural that he should at the end turn to Herbert Butterfield’s essay The Whig Interpretation of History. Butterfield’s subject in 1931 was particular, even parochial. He disliked the liberal triumphalism of much of what he read. But put into the lower case and generalised, his argument can be ...”

“... book was noticed. But it also has more solid virtues. After the extended badinage of the prefatory matter, the actual travelogue is delivered in a direct, unfussy style. Jonson hits the right note when he calls Coryate a ‘bold carpenter of words’. Much of the text is practical, indeed statistical (journey times, populations, dimensions of notable ...”