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“... as members of the customs union and the single market?Free trade zealots such as the economist Patrick Minford are happy to say in public that they wouldn’t mind seeing large parts of the British agriculture and automotive industries disappear so long as there was a net increase in national wealth. This is not, I think, what voters in Sunderland and ...”

“... same’ smell. ‘Lanolin’ is a standard descriptive term for an element in the bouquet of white Burgundies, but I don’t know what lanolin smells like, and my own suggestion would be ‘silage’ or maybe that volatile smell that comes off freshly roasted espresso beans. The routine description of Loire Sauvignon as smelling like gooseberries does ...”

“... a certain nobility: engineers and promoters in top hats and black coats, with gangs of navvies, white-shirted, leaning on their picks and shovels. These men took on London, its sticky clay, its buried rivers and polluted air, its monumental self-interest and its blind faith in scientific progress. The original calculation was generous, tunnels constructed ...”

“... is Tammas, the signing-on gambler and lover and leaver in Kelman’s second novel, A Chancer, or Patrick Doyle, the floundering schoolteacher in A Disaffection, who blows into a pair of industrial pipes he finds at the back of a club, captivated and comforted by their moaning. Like all these others, Sammy is the kind of man Kelman can commune with ...”

“... taxes on domestically-produced goods. Like some economic historians such as Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien, Brewer suggests that the taxes may well have been heavier in Britain than in many other European states, and may also have fallen disproportionately hard on the middling and lower classes, rather than the landed and rich. Plus ça change ...”

“... At RUSI’s annual land warfare conference in June, the current chief of the general staff, Patrick Sanders, praised the British army’s response to the crisis and said he would now have an answer for his grandchildren if they asked what he did in 2022.These institutions do make some less boosterish contributions. Chatham House publishes International ...”

“... dismissed most writing about Africa. On one of our car journeys I mentioned Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile, a history of exploration in the area where we were travelling, near Lake Albert. ‘I tried to read it,’ he said. ‘There’s a great difficulty. Moorehead can’t write.’ No one had depicted the Africa he was witnessing, he said. He later said ...”

“... us how they set about their task. In his splendid recent autobiography, History of a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that when as a young man he was asked by the medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough at a job interview what his research method was, all he could say was that he tried to look at everything which was remotely relevant to his subject: ‘I had ...”

“... as a faintly preposterous dandy: ‘His silver grey suits, pink shirts, with his powdered pink and white face, his nerves, his manners, his love of praise’. ‘You make a distressingly lifelike loose woman,’ Runciman gasped after seeing him in a college sketch show. Runciman, who had won a scholarship to read history at Trinity, fitted naturally into this ...”

“... hat that scared the hell out of everyone’; not to mention ‘a simple little pussycat hat in white fur-like material with feathered whiskers and the most seductive blue eyes you’ve ever seen’. Cunningham showed his last collection in 1962: ‘space helmets, sleek and naked of trimming, just pure shape, moulded like the cones of rockets and racing ...”

“... and might not; and then, in noticeably poorer country, Irish Republic tricolours, their green-white-orange optimistically symbolising reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant. Signs reading UDA and RIRA (both, in our understanding, illegal organisations) suggested that Ireland is not quite there yet, as did our first roadblock, between Armagh and ...”

“... sanity of Wilkinson and Townshend. Edwin Meese III sees the danger of over-reaction, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan stresses the importance of governments observing the law – ‘lest terrorists win by inducing a kind of bunker terrorism’. John O’Sullivan emphasises the need to deny them publicity. In the best piece in the book Leszek Kolakowski discusses ...”

“... translation of a book by the Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob, which was full of striking black and white images of their strange, patient faces – ‘Donatello-like’, Bernard O’Donoghue once said – the beauty of which Glob celebrated in what was in the English version slightly fruity prose: ‘Majesty and gentleness still stamp his features as they did ...”

“... in Algeria? An embittered hunter insinuates that Morel is ‘undermining the good name of the white man’ on behalf of Cairo or Moscow: a cynical strategy, the governor muses, since under any revolutionary regime ‘the elephants would be the first to die.’ For the anti-colonial rebels who associate themselves with Morel for publicity ...”

“... I heard that the family of an American soldier killed in Iraq receives $12,000. I heard that the White House had deleted the chapter on Iraq from the annual Economic Report of the President, on the grounds that it did not conform with an otherwise cheerful tone. Within a week in January I heard Condoleezza Rice say there were 120,000 Iraqi troops trained to ...”