“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... treatments in the 1980s and 1990s by Alzina Stone Dale and Joseph Pearce. More critical studies by Ian Ker and William Oddie have emphasised the links between a life spent joyfully giving no thought to the morrow and the apologetic books, which argue that only Christian belief can supply a maximum of wonder at this world’s existence and a maximum refusal to ...”

“... loss and deliverance. His creations were of the scale the fall of empire demanded; better than Ian Smith or Enoch Powell. But among them also belongs his Archie Rice in The Entertainer, imperialist turned malcontent, lamenting the Empire’s passing while railing at the dishonour it descended to at Suez. When he said, ‘Don’t clap too hard, ladies and ...”

“... effused one settler, ‘has ever left me with the impression of being a “whiter” man.’ Ian Smith’s Selous Scouts sustained his legend. Tidrick, however, can show that this model Rugbcian lied in order to promote the cause of white settlement and empire. In 1889 he stated, with bald falsehood, in the London press, that the high plateau of ...”

“... which they later bought, they ground out the lifestyles that were to characterise Asian life in Britain for the next twenty years. Pleasure was renounced. They worked all the double shifts and overtime slots they could grab. They pennypinched and hoarded. They rarely went out after work: they were too tight, too tired. Their broken English discouraged them ...”

“... something the oppressed cannot afford. But there is room for humour. Certainly the West Indians in Britain offer a livelier counter-tradition at present than the Scots, who have the shade of MacDiarmid to contend with. Ron Butlin’s Ragtime in Unfamiliar Bars shows the dangers of refusing the Penny Wheep challenge: a love poetry of clouds, painted cities and ...”

“... sank and the party stagnated. Many Protestants were leaving the province to go to university in Britain, and often they did not return. Trimble’s political career began with the prorogation of Stormont by Edward Heath on 24 March 1972 – ‘I am,’ he says, ‘the product of the destruction of Stormont’ – but it was fuelled by grief and anger along ...”

“... of her illusions about life in the former colonial seat (Nigeria had gained independence from Britain just two years earlier, in 1960). Joining Onwordi in London, she found that her marriage was dead on arrival, notwithstanding the conception of another son on their first night together. Onwordi, who hadn’t yet passed his accountancy exams, had spent ...”

“... year, in the Australian case there were apparently witnesses. One of these, the former Liberal MP Ian McLachlan, came forward to announce that he had been in the room, along with Costello, when Howard promised that he would not stay in office for more than two terms. It was McLachlan’s statement that prompted Costello to confirm that the rumours were ...”

“... Spanish or Gypsy low life was bred of detestation for native ‘gentility’. On the other hand, Britain’s Imperial primacy – whose memory long outlasted its reality – inevitably encouraged dreams of daring exploits in remote lands and stirring encounters with alien peoples, without necessarily unsettling loyalty to the values of the Home Counties. The ...”

“... be wrong about that. As Thatcherism was succeeded by Blairism, he sometimes wrote bitterly about Britain’s ‘dishonoured public life’; perhaps the idea of a clean slate in the North might have appealed to him. More recently, he was aware that Scotland had changed and matured in new ways. But, to be honest, it’s more likely that he stayed in tune with ...”

“... is the role of external broadcasting after 1945: was this an impartial news service or an arm of Britain’s soft diplomacy? During the Cold War, the Foreign Office funded and set the guidelines for the European Service’s broadcasting, while the BBC was supposed to have editorial control over content – an arrangement almost designed to cause friction. As ...”

“... Britain’s two leading campus novelists have long broken out of the small worlds mapped in Eating people is wrong and The British Museum is falling down. David Lodge’s latest, Paradise News, crosses at least ten time zones from Rummidge, over the Pacific Rim, to Hawaii. Doctor Criminale clocks up fewer frequent-flyer miles, but short-hauls hectically ...”