“... system seemed stuck. One result of this was a rise in support for the National Front. But Stuart Hall, in his essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ (1979), argued that the left was misreading the moment, either behaving as if interwar fascism were at the door again, or treating the Conservatives under Thatcher as run-of-the-mill Tories. The ...”

“... But it indicated that very different visions of the future were likely to be lurking behind the banner of Euroscepticism. Powell was already articulating the need to defend British sovereignty let the heavens fall, which implied that the entire European project could be dispensed with. Nothing in Thatcher’s later Bruges speech suggested she was anywhere ...”

“... sweetness of her youth. And now my utmost mystery is out. A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner. When George went with her husband to Ireland soon after her marriage, every move she made was studied intensely by the five women who were most involved with the poet. They were his unmarried sisters Lily and Lolly; Maud Gonne and Iseult; and Lady ...”

“... straight into the Cold War, with scarcely a mention of the fact that the ‘Free World’ was the banner under which the West fought it. Where democracy enters the story, it gets brusque treatment. Commenting on the rival superpowers, Hobsbawm writes: ‘Like the USSR, the USA was a power representing an ideology, which most Americans sincerely believed to be ...”

“... seems particularly urgent to find more forms of solidarity that are not based on nationality. John Stuart Mill opposed Irish Home Rule not, as many of his fellow Englishmen did, because he thought the Irish backward and incapable of self-government, but because he thought the connection saved both the English and the Irish from cultural insularity.That is ...”