“... nobody refers to Keith Kyle as a ‘collusion theorist’ because he explodes the claim that Britain, France and Israel were not acting in concert in 1956. The term ‘organised crime’, which suggests permanent conspiracy, is necessary both to understand and to prosecute a certain culture of wrongdoing. And you may have noticed that those who are too ...”

“... comes along every century or so, but the 2013 calamity – part of a series of floods that wracked Britain that winter – was portrayed by the government and media as an outrider of man-made climate change. And yet the government response was broadly the same as in 1953: money was rushed into building new flood defences. The best – a cynic would say the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... film books (they have been publishing screenplays for some time). Since the mid-Seventies, Britain has been lamentably served in this respect, with the decline or disappearance of the main series that flourished in the Sixties, the era of Bergman, Fellini and Godard. Secker had Cinema One and Cinema Two; Lorrimer did Classic and Modern Film ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Britain’s​ ‘world-leading’ university system is in deep trouble. There are, inevitably, conflicting diagnoses of the malady, but the indicators of deteriorating health are too ubiquitous to be ignored. When a substantial number of universities are in serious financial jeopardy, with some hinting at possible bankruptcy in the short term (according to the Office for Students, some 45 per cent of ‘higher education providers’ will face a deficit for 2025-26); when the viability of universities is heavily dependent on attracting large numbers of international students whose fees make up between a fifth and a third of their income and whose recruitment is vulnerable to the slightest twitch of governments’ anxieties about immigration; when nearly every week brings news of fresh closures of courses and redundancies among academics, especially in the humanities; when some of the subjects that have long been regarded as among the staple offerings of any university worthy of the name are now in danger of becoming extinct or confined to a handful of privileged institutions; when one in four UK physics departments are thought to be at risk of closure and when research council funding of the physical sciences may in some cases be reduced by as much as 30 per cent in proposals that are said to threaten ‘generational destruction’ in those fields; when undergraduates are taught in very large groups, with limited opportunities for personal contact with an established member of academic staff and only the most minimal requirement to produce written work; when the bulk of undergraduate teaching in some departments is done by people on poorly paid short-term contracts with no possibility of career progression, a precariat shamefully exploited by cash-strapped universities; when there is a growing fury and sense of injustice among graduates (and their parents) who realise that the student loans they were compelled to take out, loans that are subject to punitive interest rates and whose terms are retrospectively variable, will condemn them to paying what is in effect a higher rate of taxation for almost their entire working lives; when all these laments have become so familiar that they simply elicit a weary shrug – then it becomes difficult to deny that something has gone badly wrong with higher education in Britain ...”

“... 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 ...”