“... loosening of authority and discipline in both families and schools, by interfering namby-pamby do-gooders and by too many black immigrants. The Brixton and Toxteth riots of the summer of 1981 are held to justify the prominence of the law-and-order issue in Mrs Thatcher’s victorious election campaign two years earlier. As the Daily Express (6 July ...”

“... in Newcastle-under-Lyme that he wanted to work on a newspaper. ‘A filthy trade,’ said the good Dr Rutter. We ponder this in silence for a moment. Mr Turner taps at his lips with a long finger. Beside me on the sofa is the most recent number of the Richmond and Twickenham Times (proprietor David Dimbleby). It carries an ...”

“... about the links between the political and cultural histories of the USA during this period, but David Stowe, who teaches American Thought and Language at Michigan State University, is, to my knowledge, the first writer to have attempted a systematic history of the relationship between jazz and New Deal America. The most immediate impact of Roosevelt’s ...”

“... to visit the animals: ‘Meet your brothers, take them to your hearts and respect them.’ But as David Hancocks colourfully describes, most precursors of the modern zoo have been the opposite of this, from the circuses of Rome to the travelling menageries of the 18th and 19th centuries, shuttered in so that passers-by got no free view; and as he says (and I ...”

“... Hillary Clinton nationally by nearly 20 per cent and is 30 points behind in California. You’d think Obama would be doing better, particularly out here in California, one of the more progressive of the blue states, and where youth, good looks and fast celebrity count for a lot. But he’s not, and his appearance at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San ...”

“... refusal to believe that atheism really exists. Sir Thomas Browne writes that religious sceptics do not ‘incline me to any point of infidelity or desperate positions of atheism, for I have been, these many years, of opinion there was never any.’ This seems to be Johnson’s attitude. Of the famous atheists he mentions, he exhibits a wary respect only for ...”

“... presented an end-of-year show in which his ritualistic efforts to flirt with the likes of Jerry Hall were a running gag. His memoirs, which now run to five volumes, were another aspect of his king-of-all-media status at the height of his fame, though they stopped appearing for a while in the 1990s. An accepted fixture of the small-screen world, James ...”

“... such a power has been supposed to exist in the actinic rays which the luminary sends forth[.] I do not know ‘Euere d’or fin’. And in a very few places we can witness Faraday losing his temper with this seemingly endless barrage of requests, as in the unpunctuated pique of his reply to William Tierney ...”

“... had been left to him to dispose of as he thought fit, and that the executive had nothing to do with it’, was not just Shavian hyperbole. His incredulity at the Fabians’ supine acceptance of some token Hutchinson Lectures, duly propagating socialism, at the price of Webb being allowed ‘to commit an atrocious malversation of the rest of the ...”

“... rely on mystery. Who killed the old lady? We don’t know, so we read on to find out. Perhaps we do know, so we read on to see if the killer will be caught. It may be that we know the culprit’s identity, and know they’ll be caught, but we read on to find out how, and why they did it. Or perhaps we know all these things, but, having been introduced to a ...”

“... Steer Davies Gleave, he believes the project is essential for Britain’s future welfare. ‘Do you know what the population of Britain will be in 2085?’ he asks, and then answers his own question: ‘85 million. Where will all those people go? London can only accommodate a couple of million or so. The rest will have to be elsewhere. And if we are to ...”

“... is currently a very real risk that Brexit will distract from austerity – no longer the disaster du jour – which will nonetheless grind on, its victims unheard amid the squabbling and its effects quietly naturalised as part of Theresa May’s new political settlement. Philip Hammond’s first Autumn Statement, delivered to Parliament on 23 ...”

“... proper soundings, which is pretty much what happened on the morning of 2 July 1816, when Captain de Chaumareys piloted the French frigate Medusa into shallow water near the coast of Senegal – though in his case it was sheer incompetence rather than a deliberate decision. As crew members noted, the waters into which the Medusa was sailing were ominously ...”

“... did not get where they are by ceding their land for the common good. This holds true today, as too do the last rites of deference: London is ninety miles and many decades distant. The hierarchies of the military and the landed nobility are matched by those of the Church, whose temporal power is unusually broad because it is a major landlord. Anglicanism is not ...”

“... trouncing or violently refuting, the book is safe, principally because one experiences no wish to do either of these things. The arguments are presented in mannerly fashion; though the writer is currently agnostic, he makes no attempt to stampede or manhandle the readers into agnosticism. The style is light, to the point of sprightliness sometimes, but ...”