“... long time it has been the business of academics to build genealogies for the Novel that challenge Ian Watt’s narrative of its ‘rise’ via Defoe and Richardson and Fielding. Yet the many prehistories of the Novel that try to make Richardson’s achievement appear less surprising miss a simple truth: his contemporaries did think that Richardson’s ...”

“... of Saint Joan. In the fearful climate preceding the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in Britain in 1967, Redgrave’s sexuality was anxiously hidden from his children. After the birth of Corin’s first child Redgrave finally confessed ‘that I am, to say the least of it, bisexual’; his son sympathised with the burden of guilt and shame that he ...”

“... but over the years, the subtitle clambered into first place and usurped the incumbent. As Ian Hacking remarks in a witty and astute foreword, this is rather like the Cheshire Cat leaving behind only its grin. Hacking suggests that the disappearance or suppression of the déraison is a sign that Foucault had changed his mind about ...”

“... dismissed it as a bit of fun, but a spokesperson for Sturgeon responded: ‘Brexit may risk taking Britain back to the early 1970s, but there is no need for coverage of events to lead the way.’When #MeToo ripped across the globe in October 2017, the Scottish government was particularly receptive. It set up a review of its existing complaints procedure ...”

“... thriving industry has grown up around this appetite for blood. The popularity of crime fiction in Britain has been understood as a response to the fragmentation of 20th-century social structures, as old assumptions around class and gender dissolved. But the 20th century is long behind us, and the stream of novels, films and TV series based on homicidal ...”

“... say, Pincher accepts as gospel virtually every allegation ever made by the extreme Right in either Britain or the US. Thus Joe McCarthy’s allegation that Alger Hiss was a Communist spy is treated as simple fact, as is his claim that FDR’s most trusted adviser. Harry Dexter White, the founder of the IMF and the World Bank, was also working for the ...”

“... Britain is​ the most centralised country in the Western world. Its political system is weighted overwhelmingly towards Westminster, with few institutional safeguards against the writ of Parliament, itself increasingly in thrall to the executive. Of every £1 raised in taxation, 91 pence is controlled and allocated by central government ...”

“... chief, the health secretary Jeremy Hunt. Provocatively, Stevens compared the situation in Britain now to the time of the NHS’s birth in 1948, seventy years ago – ‘an economy in disarray, the end of empire, a nation negotiating its place in the world, a need for massive house building’. Sticking the knife in even deeper, he reminded the ...”

“... relish in his plain statement of fact. ‘London was, but is no more.’ It reminds me of hearing Ian Holloway, the manager of Queen’s Park Rangers, on the radio. He’s got a nice West Country burr, very soothing for his employers. He was talking about his club’s horrible run of form when he said, with disarming optimism, ‘I think we’re right on the ...”

“... in 2006, in his book Celsius 7/7: ‘There are many Muslims across the globe, within Europe and in Britain, who share the basic ideological assumptions behind the jihadist worldview,’ he wrote in Chapter 8, which is called ‘The Trojan Horse’. Ofsted inspected Park View twice in March 2014, just before the story broke and just after, but Gove demanded ...”

“... so. (Still, at the 1945 Labour Party Conference, Ernest Bevin came raging up to those, including Ian Mikardo and oddly enough James Callaghan, who had called for public ownership to be in the Manifesto and yelled: ‘Congratulations! You have just lost us the election.’) Harold Wilson actually beat the Tories four times at the polls, which on the consensus ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... bring out a comparison or illustrate a point but set out in such a way that the point is missed. Ian Levitt claims that ‘lagging health indicators show poverty,’ but the only figures he advances, the number of hospital in-patients per year, expanding from 1890 to 1960, are mainly a sign of the increase in hospital provision. There is a failure to ...”

“... elsewhere in German society. But as the best study of public opinion in the Third Reich, that of Ian Kershaw on Bavaria, a traditionally anti-semitic area, tells us with grim precision, to the population as a whole the massacre of the Jews ‘was of no more than minimal interest’. Anti-semitism was a force, not one of the strongest ones, in political ...”