“... many are peers, and they form a disparate group. The last full meeting of the Privy Council was held in 1839, which suggests a purely ceremonial function. But isn’t the House of Lords enough of a theatrical show? What special purpose does the council serve? David Rogers’s book, only the second published on the subject ...”

“... equally illuminating in charting their subjects’ partial successes and partial failures. Thus David Hume attacked the 18th-century myth of an ancient British constitution and warned his readers of the disastrous political consequences of ignoring their history. By reminding them of the recent emergence of constitutional government he wished to point to ...”

“... of educational progress’. A great many pupils demonstrated in his favour. An enquiry was held: Mackenzie was suspended, and retired before his time. My teacher relatives in Aberdeen used to speak of him obliquely, with crumpled brows, in lowered voices, allowing that he had ‘meant well’, upset because he had ‘gone too far’. He had come to his ...”

“... nor too conservative, neither too popular nor too élitist. Shakespeare, like the Queen, is held to be above politics; his regal status has been confirmed by the formation of the Royal Shakespeare Company – a title of which it has been said that ‘it’s got everything in it except God.’ And indeed the many resemblances between Shakespeare and God ...”

“... In November of the following year he alerted his readers to the absence, in the art of David Hockney, of ‘the spiritual quest at the heart of modernism’. Several years later, in June 1981, he gave warning that the stained canvases of Morris Louis, the leading member of the ‘Washington Colour School’, did not represent the breakthrough that ...”

“... majority of the British people want – is to make changes to our relationship.’ The author? David Cameron. Of course, some people have always vociferously advocated a straight choice between stay or leave. These include Farage and Ukip, but they also included the Lib Dems. Among the many puzzling features of recent politics is that the new Lib Dem ...”

“... The moment was late in 1970, at the Travellers’ Club in London, during a supper for 14 people. David Brower, the saint of eco-sanity from the Sierra Club in California, had just given a sermon, a hell-fire variant of the one geologists have used for a century or more: rocks are long, life is short, who do we think we are? Brower’s homily – which the ...”

“... portray the Zionist pioneers waging a war of independence against the British oppressor. Jon and David Kimche provided a good example of the conventional Israeli analysis of British policy in Both Sides of the Hill: Britain and the Palestine War (1960). ‘It was a mixture of ignorance, blundering, indecision and local bias against the Jews, encouraged by ...”

“... when readers were alerted to her fiction by the commendations of two admirers, Philip Larkin and David Cecil. Having been out, she became ‘the in-thing to read’, and reviewers rushed to praise the late novel Quartet in Autumn – now in paperback – as if it were a match for her early work.* Meanwhile her early work has been reissued, including Jane and ...”

“... as a step in an inquiry or at least a historical record. We discard the sensation that originally held us gripped. Reversing that drift, the exhibition Drawing the Unspeakable at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne (until 27 April) points us back to mark making’s lived intensity. By its very title, this capacious, overwhelming array – of work mostly but not ...”

“... and behind it lay the struggle of a very rich man to do good. In his role as owner-editor, David Astor had more freedom than any other journalist in London, but power made him bashful and uneasy. When, towards the end of Astor’s editing career, the South African journalist Donald Woods proposed a series of interviews with him, Astor suggested that ...”

“... behaviour, as part of a Newtonian self-equilibrating system. Thus the city was created and held together by each man going about his business of buying and selling, among other commodities, human labour, either his own or somebody else’s. There is, indeed, much truth in this notion, for, as Adam Smith had implied, the market, together with its ...”

“... Israel offered Egypt a separate peace. Nasser could have had in 1968-9 what Sadat achieved at Camp David. Indeed, he might have got Gaza as well. But Nasser was opposed to Egypt’s deserting its allies and concluding a separate peace. ‘The West Bank,’ he declared, ‘is more important to me than Sinai.’ The substitution of Nixon for Johnson made no ...”

“... the subsequent change all the more remarkable. In 1966 a conference of social anthropologists held in Edinburgh was devoted to the theme of ‘History and Social Anthropology’; the Proceedings contain contributions by six anthropologists and two historians. The anthropologists refer only to the works of fellow anthropologists; the historians only to the ...”

“... spent an afternoon with him once in the old Army and Navy Club in Washington. Everything about him held my attention, starting with his history as a counterintelligence officer in London during the Second World War, fresh out of Yale. But it was the man himself, sitting on the edge of an overstuffed club chair, pulling a Virginia Slim from a cigarette ...”