“... Ill-health had only recently forced him to step down as Chancellor. Along with Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison, he had incontrovertibly been one of the cornerstones of the postwar Labour Government. Indeed, from 1947 he was not only the executive force directing its strategy for economic recovery but also the public face of ...”

“... proclaim ‘Power to the people’ in making usage the only criterion of whether something may be said, there is then for them an immediate opening-up of rich new possibilities of authority and authoritarianism. For who is to tell the people how the people are (is?) using their (its?) immense language except the indispensable new class of panoptic ...”

“... criticism of Israel is excessive, the earlier adulation was, and that an answer to present woes may be found in the history of Zionism, including the period just before the birth of the state described in Norman Rose’s ‘A Senseless, Squalid War’ and David Cesarani’s Major Farran’s Hat. Both books deal with the last years of the Mandate, when the ...”

“... Back​ in 1954, the American critic Ernest Campbell Mossner brought out a Life of David Hume that was not only a pioneering work of scholarship but also a labour of love. Mossner wanted to rescue his hero from the romantic reactionaries who typecast him as a narrow-minded representative of the Age of Reason. In particular, he hoped to challenge the condescension of Thomas Carlyle, who dismissed Hume as an associate of Voltaire and the French philosophes, and a slave to the ‘obscurations of sense, which eclipse this truth within us ...”

“... Reading may not make the world go round but it can make it go away, for a while. If one’s world is dirty, poor, oppressive and unfair, then that may be no small service. Books furnish the mind in a form that the bailiffs cannot repossess. If we could recover the reading practices of past generations, we would be in touch with an experience that was at once intimate and formative, on a par with, even part of, the history of love ...”

“... goes well beyond it. But in England, the old genre has withered. Of recent Cabinet Ministers, only Ernest Bevin (two vols down, one to go) and Nye Bevan (canonised by Michael Foot) have received extended treatment, while the massive life of Churchill is unique in its Victorian dimensions. Today, the best way for a politician to guarantee this much-coveted form ...”

“... mending when the authoress was busy writing and dazzling. And the complications of the situation may have held a thrill for Nesbit. Though trendily expressed, Julia Briggs’s account of her subject’s attitude towards her husband rings true: ‘Edith found it impossible to write herself into the script of Bland’s love life without becoming his usual ...”

“... France’s last colonial conflict has been largely erased from collective memory – a reminder of Ernest Renan’s dictum that forgetting is a crucial factor in the historical consciousness of a political community. Alongside its amnesia, Gaullist technocracy too easily conflated the general will with the will of the general. By tipping the scales decisively ...”

“... style of the books has its quirks,’ Summerson complained: ‘an affectation (it may be) of looseness – like notes on the back of an envelope’.Leaving aside the question of how he imagined the books could be written except by means of rapid notes, ‘looseness’ is exactly the wrong word to describe Pevsner’s prose. With the exception ...”

“... and varied’. MacLeod ingeniously suggests the sensual pleasures of reading: Mickey Spillane and Ernest Haycox vied with Dostoevsky and Faulkner, and the Penguin Poets edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins arrived in the same box as a little book on sex technique called Getting the Most out of Love. The former had been assiduously annotated by a very fine hand ...”

“... May 1915 saw the end of the last purely Liberal government in Britain. October 1964 saw the defeat of the last aristocrat to head a Conservative government by a Labour Party dedicated to regenerating the country through the ‘white heat of technology’. Each event marked, in its way, a decline of power. The first saw the disappearance of a liberal individualist state, governed by a caste of liberal individualist gentlemen ...”

“... He’s the strongish, silent type who won’t complain if there are no croissants at breakfast. He may not succumb to the t-shirt, but he’s busy having been there, done that. He can be moved by a spectacular view at the end of a dreadful day. He believes that nothing should come easy, there must be endemic hassle and haggle from dawn to dusk. And because the ...”

“... Tillyard was ‘discovering’ Ulysses’ Degree speech as the key to Shakespeare’s thought, Ernest Cassidy was citing it indignantly as an instance of bourgeois mystification in a pamphlet on ‘Shakespeare and the Working Classes’. After a long period of relative calm in Shakespeare studies, the onslaught on Bardolatry is being renewed by two ...”

“... It is compelled to cry out for some notion of what lies in store. And the answers to such cries may be terribly influential, as well as wrong. This is the real reason the curious activity of prophecy counts for so much. The most garbled, or even insane, forecast can end up moving things in one direction rather than another. Illusions, too, ...”

“... Why … are people prepared to lay down their lives for their country?’ Some of the answers may lie in the enabling detachment of kinship emotion from its original sources. Such feelings can be strengthened, even as they are diffused or redeployed. Because this kind of siblinghood is ‘metaphorical’, it doesn’t follow that it’s weaker, or watered ...”