“... Fabians attended by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, Attlee whispered to his brother: ‘Do we have to grow a beard to join this show?’ The confident pre-1914 left, he later reflected, had been too rigid in its scientific approach to social problems and altogether ‘too Webby’. Socialist eggheads remained a source of exasperation into the late ...”

“... resort to expletives. So it’s no big deal in itself that May’s political advisers do a lot of swearing. But that they did it in front of the clean-living daughter of a vicar, without rebuke or frown or raised eyebrow, suggests that the prime minister’s emotional costiveness is not simply a result of on-stage nerves. It is hardwired into her ...”

“... If​ Scots sometimes seem unduly exasperated with Brexiter nationalism, it isn’t just because they voted heavily against Brexit. Nor, in the case of Scottish unionists, is it simply a consequence of a well-founded anxiety that our reckless departure from the EU threatens to break up the United Kingdom. Rather, it comes from the perception that England’s nationalism is crude, unreflective and cartoonish by comparison with the arguments put forward for Scottish independence ...”

“... wholeheartedly pursue, and that was always, it seems, up for negotiation. Did IRA volunteers do time in jail, did their comrades die, in combat or in hunger strikes, for the compromise deal that was at the forefront of IRA strategy for three decades from the early 1970s?Others beyond the IRA leadership also bore responsibility for the continuing ...”

“... insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January 2021, the United States experienced a less obtrusive coup d’état: the hustled retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, the oldest of the three remaining liberals on the Supreme Court. The prematurely leaked announcement in late January took Breyer himself by surprise. But the leak wasn’t any more of a breach of ...”

“... The pro-Europeans defeated the antis by a margin of 67 per cent to 33 per cent on the question ‘Do you think the United Kingdom should stay in the European Community (Common Market)?’ History might not take exactly the same course, but it seemed unlikely that the 2016 result would defy both of these historical parallels. In the event history did not ...”

“... gives space to the voices of British Americans disillusioned with the so-called patriot cause. Dr Sylvester Gardiner, for instance, in a letter to his son-in-law, contrasted the benign governance of the colonies under British rule with the mob rule he encountered in Boston: ‘I don’t believe there ever was a people in any age or part of the world that ...”

“... of justice, ‘the promotion of mediocrity’ and ‘marital break-ups’: why, the cover asks, ‘do so many husbands don an apron at the lodge when they wouldn’t be seen dead in one at home?’ British fears of Masonic conspiracy have never risen to the same pitch as on the Continent or in the United States, not least because our history lacks an ...”

“... high culture. Pocock – perhaps alone among early modern British historians – is also able to do justice to Gibbon’s global vision. Indeed, the central thesis – among the many compelling ideas to be found in Barbarism and Religion – involves a major recasting of the celebrated historian of the Latin West as an unexpected historian of a Eurasian ...”

“... Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) presents several faces to the modern world. His measured acceptance of the new forces of democracy unleashed by the American and French Revolutions made him an icon of moderate centrist liberalism. However, he has also had his champions on the right, at least among sophisticated Cold Warriors determined to maintain connections with a broader liberal tradition, including, in his native France, Raymond Aron and Jean-François Revel, for whom Tocqueville’s oeuvre was the sole haven of grace and trust within a canon of modern political philosophy whose prescriptions – from right as much as left – seemed to lead to mass extermination or indoctrination ...”

“... Among the intellectual figures who have shaped the modern world Adam Smith stands out as someone who doesn’t frighten the laity, might be positively welcomed indeed by middle England. Should the neighbours catch a glimpse of the Wealth of Nations sitting on the bookshelf alongside Thatcher’s memoirs or the latest Delia Smith, there’s no risk of ostracism ...”

“... the question whether we have a responsibility to be healthy. But if his main concern is fiscal, do we then owe it to society to pass on the greens and tuck in to the chips? Welfare reform raises thorny issues of its own. Is dependency on the state bad for taxpayers or bad for the recipients of welfare? Cameron risks reviving the distinction between the ...”

“... built on the banks of the Potomac between 1963 and 1971 in the Foggy Bottom area of Washington DC. Its handy location between the centre of government and the traditional residences of Georgetown proved attractive to congressmen and members of the Nixon administration, who flocked to the new apartments. In 1967, the Democratic National Committee took over ...”

“... maternal grandfather was a regicide who had signed Charles I’s death warrant. In The Trial of Dr Sacheverell (1973), which remains the standard account of the cleric’s career, the late Geoffrey Holmes wondered if Sacheverell’s soaring high churchmanship ‘contains in its very extremity more than a hint of revulsion from his own tainted stock’. This ...”

“... union. There was no need at all for a Scottish parliament. What would a white elephant like that do for Scotland that couldn’t be done in private? Much better, surely, to have a fierce Scot in the cabinet who, in return for doing the prime minister’s bidding, was indulged in his demands, however outrageous, for cross-border subsidy. Wilson was more ...”