“... they could. In any case, he argues, Mrs Thatcher’s Wets were less silent than she and Sir Keith Joseph had been in the Heath Cabinet, and far noisier than the prudent men who staffed her later Cabinets. It is an honourable account but it leaves out what I thought at the time (perhaps wrongly) was the Wets’ real weakness: they had no political base in the ...”

“... spoke).Sometimes the index could be a powerful epistemic tool. For ten months of 1601 and 1602, Joseph Scaliger put his own work aside to assemble 24 indexes to the enormous corpus of Greek and Latin inscriptions that his correspondent Janus Gruter’s publisher was putting through the press in Heidelberg. He didn’t want to do it. In fact, he claimed, his ...”

“... In it, he argued that the greatest piece of French Revolutionary writing – Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès’s incendiary What Is the Third Estate? (1789) – reflected broad changes in 18th-century French society, which increasingly used the tools of political economy to understand itself and had begun to link political rights to economic ...”

“... century has Staphylococcus aureus, as MRSA, attracted much attention from British politicians. Michael Howard’s mother-in-law died from a hospital infection and he made its control an issue in the 2005 general election campaign. Risk theorists say that top-level support for safety spending is much greater for air travel than for oil refineries because ...”

“... but is cited by the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Bush’s head of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, who claimed that Bauer provided a model of how to interrogate prisoners. The movie Rules of Engagement was another common source of populist legalism, invoked to exonerate those who use extreme measures to extract ‘vital’ information. And ...”

“... invaluable. In the course of their marriage she had serious love affairs with other men, including Michael Oakeshott and Isaiah Berlin. She was attracted by brains, and that is what drew her to Hart. His attraction to her seems very natural: her outrageousness and lack of inhibition must have made him feel alive. She despised ...”

“... Ponting first came to notice as a fearless whistleblower in the Ministry of Defence who exposed Michael Heseltine’s dodgy behaviour during the inquiry into the sinking of the Belgrano. As a historian he has made effective use of this reputation as the man they dare not gag. His writings tend to present themselves as ‘revisionist’ (his book on ...”

“... the idea of a slow unfolding from the incarnation as a moment in history was giving way to what Michael Hall in his 2014 study of the architect G.F. Bodley called a belief in its ‘eternal nature’ outside time. It was a shift of understanding that found expression in art and in architecture, but Ashton doesn’t discuss it. Beyond a few references to ...”

“... up the slopes towards the French positions. In his classic account of the war, the historian Michael Howard described what happened next:The field officers on their horses were the first casualties. The men on foot struggled forward against the chassepot fire as if into a hailstorm, shoulders hunched, heads bowed, directed only by the shouts of their ...”

“... myth. Everett shares his taste for marrying comedy and philosophy with Thomas Pynchon and the Joseph Heller of Catch-22 and Good as Gold. But there’s only one writer who resembles him in any significant way. Like Everett, J.M. Coetzee was a student of logic who turned to fiction. ‘My name is Eugene Dawn,’ the narrator of his early story ‘The ...”

“... in Media movement: among AIM’s patrons were William Simon, the former Treasury Secretary, Joseph Coors, the beer magnate and Reagan confidant, Claire Booth Luce, Jimmy Goldsmith and Richard Mellon-Scaife. Moon now felt confident enough to take on the hated New York Times by launching the New York News World and, in 1982, to take similar aim at the ...”

“... more recently to find Isaiah Berlin lumping Burke in with ‘reactionary thinkers’ such as Joseph de Maistre. Berlin’s friend Stuart Hampshire is contemptuous not simply of Burke’s views but of the quality of his thought: Burke’s rhetoric was mere assertion. It was not proof or even argument. He was not clear and he was not consistent. He saw ...”

“... to carry important meaning in Doctorow’s narratives; in Loon Lake the vagrant hero was given Joseph Conrad’s Polish name; in the more autobiographical World’s Fair the author’s own name was used. Here the hero-narrator is called Billy Bathgate. The allusion is not to the unlovely Scottish mining town but to Bathgate Avenue in Doctorow’s native ...”

“... might suggest was the ‘evidence’ that blacks were not brothers ‘under the skin’. In Julien-Joseph Virey’s popular Histoire Naturelle du Génie Humain (first published in 1801) a profile taken from a sculpture of the bearded Zeus is contrasted with one of an Ibo African with large lips, flat nose and receding brow, and one of an orangutan. Virey ...”

“... Covell’s scholarly, discriminating and curiously detached study of the Cambridge fogeys – Michael Oakeshott, John Casey, Maurice Cowling and Roger Scruton – with side-glances at Shirley Robin Letwin and the conservative potential in Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Other than that, some of the conservatives are closer to ...”