“... for either of the main parties to forge decisively ahead. Seventy seats in the new Parliament are held by MPs who are not Labour or Tory. In 1970 that figure was 12. Back then, Northern Irish electoral politics were still an extension of what happened on the mainland: the Ulster Unionists, effectively the Northern Irish branch of the Conservative Party, won ...”

“... is Dalton on a meeting of the Constitutional Sub-Committee of the Party’s National Executive, held in January 1934 to consider the recent pronouncements of Sir Stafford Cripps: Cripps seems quite unable to see the argument that he is damaging the party electorally. It is all ‘misreporting’, or picking sentences out of their context. He has become ...”

“... to avoid a recurrence of Vietnam syndrome, where the wide circulation of images of the dead was held partly responsible for the vigour of the antiwar movement. This wasn’t the reason given: the claim has been that withholding such images is a mark of respect for grieving families, and accords with their own expressed desires. A First Amendment activist ...”

“... from which we needed to escape. We all know what it means to be interfered with, bossed about, held back, dealt with arbitrarily. But can we recognise when this is being done to us by the state? What sort of experience is it? It is the experience of being interfered with by someone solely on account of the position they hold within the state, of being ...”

“... highlight what Huysmans believed to be the ‘alarming message’ that female sexual promiscuity held for bourgeois patriarchy. The burden of Callen’s historicism at this juncture rests on Huysmans’s words rather than on her own analysis of the pastels. It is odd, therefore, that she cites his essay not in the original but as it is quoted or paraphrased ...”

“... comedy was only just beginning to bite, Morecambe and Wise showed that national audiences could be held with material that was innovative, sparkling, and as demotically surreal as anything from the universities and metropolitan comedy clubs. They also showed that there could be such a thing as victimless comedy. In explaining and in celebrating this, McCann is ...”

“... plebiscite too many in 1969 and was finished. It is also easy to forget that the first referendum held in the British Isles took place in Northern Ireland in 1973, on the question of whether the province should remain part of the United Kingdom or be joined with the Republic of Ireland. This was not a propitious time or place to start experimenting with more ...”

“... as we now know by his own peculiar account, took place in his bathroom. Since one of the girls is held to have drowned in the bath, the prosecution saw fit to have this detachable part of the crime scene brought into court, to authenticate a pathologist’s testimony, even though there was nothing remotely unorthodox about Huntley’s bath that might have ...”

“... weight to it should ponder the Conservative defeat in genteel South Edinburgh, a seat they had held since the 19th-century Reform Bills, and the loss of its MP, one of the ministerial architects of the poll tax, Michael Ancram; or the fact that they came within the narrowest shave of losing their Defence Secretary George Younger, in Ayr – by general ...”

“... who wanted me to read verses at a little morning session for foreign poets. ‘Oh, please, Mr David. We only have one Frenchman so far.’ Foolishly I agreed to pipe up if she really ran short of European versifiers. By Easter Sunday we were enjoying an ideal English summer, blue skies and cool breeze. We were feasted, Arab poems were beautifully ...”

“... the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I in 1290. During the next fortnight five meetings were held, the last of them open to the public, before the convention was adjourned. It did not meet again. Menasseh ben Israel, who from his base in Amsterdam had for eight years been mobilising support for the readmission of the Jews to England, was broken by the ...”

“... in the popular iconography of American freedom, alongside comic-book heroes in capes and tights. David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, a federalist president who failed to secure re-election, has sold two million copies since it was published in 2001. For all its sentimental and antiquarian dimensions, the cult of the founders has damaging political ...”

“... the reason novelists and short-story writers are often quite distinct breeds). The American writer David Means will have none of this. His highly original stories are coats that have been reversed to show their linings. Rather than lightly hint at an exquisite pattern or organising symbol, he likes to accentuate the pattern, to dash it in the reader’s ...”

“... transition period. They were belatedly tabled at the summit convened by Bill Clinton at Camp David in July 2000, but Jerusalem was the issue that ultimately led to the failure of the summit and the breakdown of the Oslo peace process. Religious rivalries are notoriously difficult to resolve, and Jerusalem’s spiritual significance for the three great ...”

“... got properly started before it begins to show signs of not going on for ever. So when I read in David Plante’s Difficult Women (1979) that Sonia Orwell in her final years complained to him, ‘I’ve fucked up my life. I’m angry because I’ve fucked up my life,’ it doesn’t seem to me necessarily to imply a particularly tragic or wasted life. At ...”