“... comes ill from a man who sneered ruthlessly at his own country while giving aid and comfort to Ian Smith’s gang of traitors and mutineers. The vulgarity of the politics also compromises, I find, the impression of the gentleman. When Worsthorne writes of being taken up by Irving Kristol at Encounter in the mid-Fifties, his self-deprecation deserts him as ...”

“... for novelists to acknowledge their sources. At the beginning of The Child in Time, for example, Ian McEwan lists Christina Hardyment’s Dream Babies, David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order and Joseph Chilton Pearce’s Magical Child. In Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis acknowledges, among a number of others, Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi ...”

“... social or cultural collapse, as Ben Jonson did, and this view is intemperately represented by Ian Robinson. He holds that the decline of the ceremonious style in the House of Commons is a clear indication of national decadence in this ‘century of the common man, of the “media”, and a “public opinion” definable by poll counts, the age of ...”

“... Michael Heseltine). There is respectful deference: he claims to have heard a speech by Ian Gow ‘of dizzying eloquence’. And there are the wilder Freudian fantasies, not untinged with fetishistic obsessions, as of Sir Keith Joseph at an Annual Conference, ‘wearing one black and one brown shoe’. How many of ...”

“... is the concept of probability, a mathematical tool which is remarkable not least because, as Ian Hacking has shown, it was developed remarkably late in the history of Western thought. There is no hint of probabilistic reasoning in classical Greek thought, and even in the 16th century the Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano could claim that when a dice ...”

“... And in all four of the seats where the MDC put up white candidates, they were elected by huge (black) majorities. After Tsvangirai criticised Mugabe for anti-white racism and declared that ‘the whites are our cousins,’ I found myself joshingly addressed as ‘cousin’ by some blacks – it makes a change from ‘comrade’ – and when my briefcase ...”

“... urged them on with his vehement verses ‘Riflemen, Form!’ in the Times. Their historian Ian Beckett prefaces his book with a verse from the more popular poet Martin Tupper. Cannot we see them? – impatiently waiting, Hundreds of thousands, all hungry for spoil, Breathing out slaughter, and bitterly hating Britain and all that is born of her ...”

“... boundaries, Labour shut its party office in town. Deirdre thinks that the local Labour MP, Ian Lavery, is too wary of encountering hostile locals. She feels isolated. ‘Every Sunday night, when we go to town and have a game of bingo in the club, and people are always having a go, you know, here’s the Labour Party coming. You know, this ...”

“... to burnish his culture wars résumé. Also disgraceful was the disenfranchisement of Florida’s black electorate on his watch. Florida election officials, ostensibly looking to prevent felons from casting ballots, worked from lists riddled with errors and mistaken entries, with the result that more than 12,000 qualified ...”

“... Her Friends, in which she observed that her subject would always be an outsider. Twenty years ago Ian Hamilton wrote that Mew’s reputation ‘hangs by a thread’. Her Collected Poems and Prose has long been out of print and there are no critical books devoted to her writing.I’m not sure she would have minded. Reading essays that seek to rehabilitate or ...”

“... Mind of Watts’, where, as against the ‘basic realities’, the ‘bitter realities’, of the black ghetto, Pynchon describes white Los Angeles as ‘that creepy world full of pre-cardiac Mustang drivers who scream insults at one another only when the windows are up; of large corporations where Nice-guyship is the standing order regardless of whose ...”

“... and little magazines – Divers Press (with Ann), Origin (with Corman), and then (with Olson) Black Mountain Review, named for Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Olson became rector and in 1954 brought Creeley to teach. Creeley, Olson and Corman would soon see themselves, with some justice, as part of a ...”

“... taming it. This gives it a special political utility. ‘Probability cannot dictate values,’ Ian Hacking wrote in The Taming of Chance (1990), ‘but it now lies at the basis of all reasonable choices made by officials. No public decision, no risk analysis, no environmental impact, no military strategy can be conducted without decision theory couched in ...”

“... Media and Sport Select Committee. Two Conservative peers gave glowing character references: Baron Black of Brentwood, a former director of the Press Complaints Commission, for Stuart Kuttner, managing editor at the News of the World, and Baroness Warsi, a minister of state in the Foreign Office, for Coulson. The influence of News International had helped ...”

“... even where passports existed.A s​ a refresher course in historical reality, I recommend Ian Goldin’s Shortest History of Migration. Goldin is a multiple migrant, his family originally from Lithuania, he himself finishing up in England, via South Africa, France and the US. Had his parents and grandparents not fled, they would have perished in the ...”