“... and that government has to depend still more heavily on the governing institutions whose power had held the economy back. Mr Middlemas’s thesis should not be swallowed whole. His account of the aborted crisis of 1911 to 1918, and of the growth of the corporate system which aborted it, seems to me masterly. His insight into the economic consequences of ...”

“... IAEA) and eventually enshrined in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The NPT held that the countries which already had nuclear weapons – the US, USSR, China, France and Britain – could keep them: they were the ‘nuclear club’ and no one else could join. In return they would supply peaceful atomic technology (as they were already ...”

“... they fight for fun, or chimpanzees. They communicate about communication. One battle in particular held my attention as it spooled and unspooled for fifteen minutes or so, over, through and around an elaborate array of obstacles, each in turn a catalyst for experiment and improvisation. It seemed to make no difference at all to the battle’s intensity and ...”

“... voters had to battle through icy conditions to get to the polling stations. Despite this, turnout held up remarkably well across the country. Nearly four-fifths of the electorate cast a vote, which was a significant increase on the previous election in June 1970, even though that one had taken place with the sun shining. The weather does not foretell how ...”

“... for everyone involved in the fields of AI and machine learning. Unfortunately several events held at – or in conjunction with – the 2017 conference fell short of these standards. We are determined to do better in 2018 and beyond.’ I didn’t notice any of this while I was there. Perhaps I should have been looking harder.) The nice people at WiML ...”

“... In​ March, as news coverage narrowed to a single story, the housing barristers in my chambers held their monthly meeting. ‘Everything will close,’ one senior colleague predicted, ‘schools, courts …’ But nothing did. For a strange, vertiginous time, life continued as normal. The streets of London were busy, the museums full of people ...”

“... were too forced and frenzied to convince: clever advocacy rather than expressions of deeply-held belief. He helped to shout down Asquith in the Commons in 1911, and his exhortations to Ulster Unionists in the years immediately before the First World War bordered on the treasonable. Yet, while publicly thus partisan to the point of excess, he was ...”

“... in a manner not without resonance today, a culture in which logic, science and formality held sway was giving way to one in which real men could cry. In The School for Scandal, Sheridan exposed the false man of sentiment, not for his expressed beliefs but for his hypocrisy. As O’Toole argues persuasively, Sheridan’s politics were an expression of ...”

“... themselves as anxious, concerned, generous, philanthropic, benevolent and public-spirited. And it held out the prospect that if they treated their subjects with such unprecedented consideration and condescension, then their subjects might remain loyal and deferential to them in return. In short, this book describes how the royal family, by a mixture of lucky ...”

“... example, the hapless intellectuals and talkative professors of 1848, lampooned by Engels and held in contempt by later generations, have been treated more sympathetically in recent work on the revolution. And the historical verdict on the 1850s and 1860s, once a byword for the civic torpor of literary and academic life, has undergone similar ...”

“... the Revolution of 1848 had brought it to an end, stood as a liberal candidate in three elections held that year. Each time he polled only a few hundred votes, partly because his republicanism, though sincere, was naive, and perhaps because of his way with hecklers, who might find themselves tipped into the nearest river. He was offended by the naked ambition ...”

“... and unequal. This was a pumped-up version of the Enlightenment theory of doux commerce, which held that growing trade, founded on mutually beneficial contracts and the rule of law, would provide opportunity and riches for all, and eventually consign wars, empires and great-power politics to the past. The belief that market-led development strategies would ...”

“... casts his vote on the way home. He masters the uneasy feeling by faithful attendance at debates held by the League of Nations Union at Central Hall, Westminster, where he meets Katherine Bott, a teacher at a London County Council senior mixed school somewhere south of the river. Katherine, too, leads a bleak lodging-house existence punctuated by Sunday ...”

“... can be tolerated, and might even be enjoyed, as piano-players in the funhouse of letters. Early in David Plante’s diaries, we find him tinkling away, dropping names in basso profundo, as if knowing people and knowing what they do in private can be the thing that makes one special. He is 28 years old when he comes to London from the US (a little younger than ...”

“... The bank was instrumental in the rise of the modern British state and its global reach, but as David Kynaston shows in his official history, it has always had an uncertain relationship with the state, mediating awkwardly between the private imperatives of finance and the public demands of politics. When the bank was founded in 1694, its business was to ...”