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“... that were ‘built to envious show’ amidst the riot of competitive expenditure in the reign of James I. The Sidneys never had the money to spoil their inheritance, which survives as a glorious muddle of a house, centred on an enchanting Medieval hall and sprawling out into its Renaissance and later additions. Jonson’s poem makes virtues of the family’s ...”

“... and splendour when it acts as a vehicle for narrative in its own right: when, as in an Edward Hopper painting, period fashion recedes in favour of a chiaroscuro telling of the hour and the season, and colour co-ordination gives way to a dialogue between the characters and the inanimate tokens of their regrets. Thus at the end of season two we see ...”

“... and theory as ‘exile’ or ‘displacement’, and defined with appropriate terminality by Edward Said in his essay, ‘Reflections on Exile’:Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can ...”

“... I’ve sat on the lawn reading the Block Prince’s Register and other sources for the reign of Edward III. On Tuesday I took a complete holiday. Taking sandwiches I left college at 8.40 a.m., called for Rowse at All Souls, and walked through the early morning sunshine to the station. There we took the train to South Leigh. It was ten by the time we arrived ...”

“... The power of central bankers – about which Edward Luttwak wrote in the LRB of 14 November – arises not just from their control over important aspects of economic policy, but also from the acceptance by the rest of us of what they may legitimately do in the exercise of this control. Until recently, our acceptance of the notion that central bankers should be committed to price stability has been entirely uncritical; and price stability (not low, but zero inflation) is what the European Central Bank will be required to maintain ...”

“... forth into the vast unknowns of social class, religious denomination and regional culture. Edward Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (1963) was a landmark here, and we now possess histories of feminism, pacifism, of the movements against slavery and cruelty to animals, and for free trade, family allowances, factory-hours and public ...”

“... hybrid in culture. It is no accident that he started on a postgraduate thesis at Oxford on Henry James, hardly the most congenial of topics for an English literary leftist, but with an obvious appeal for a student of intercultural relations. His suspicion of fully-fledged systems is also, ironically enough, characteristically English. The most obviously ...”

“... thinking outside the New Labour box. Baldwin and Glasman represent the yin and the yang of Project Edward Miliband: the bruiser and the dreamer. So far, though, there is little sign of harmony. One of Baldwin’s first acts was to issue an injunction to the broadcasters (who ignored it) and to Labour spokespersons (who didn’t) that it was time to stop ...”

“... days); he knew his literary career wouldn’t have taken off but for the patronage of Shaw and Edward Thomas; he also knew some thought him overrated, a ‘nature poet’ who had earned that tag by sleeping under hedges rather than the quality of his verse: I hear men say: ‘This Davies has no depth, He writes of birds, of staring cows and sheep, And ...”

“... by virtue of their religion, literature and laws, were as Jewish as he was. Douglas Hurd and Edward Young’s Disraeli: or, the Two Lives, and Robert O’Kell’s Disraeli: The Romance of Politics diverge when they come to Disraeli’s Byronism. Hurd and Young wave it aside: ‘Disraeli aspired to a career like that of Byron, Shelley and the other ...”

“... the Macmillan family, though not quite as rich), and young Anthony (known at this point as James) grew up amid commercial and political affluence. He was sent to Westminster, where he was ‘miserable’, and which is recorded in these pages largely as a venue for scarlet fever and a host for the Air Training Corps. Much is made of Benn’s academic ...”

“... Parliament, Lord Wedgwood certainly deserves most of the tributes he receives from Robert Rhodes James in a Foreword to this work. On the other hand, even in the Thirties it was optimistic of Wedgwood to suppose that the compilation of biographies of Members of the Commons would necessarily reveal the more admirable qualities of those Englishmen who ...”

“... fought over in recent years. A fierce debate broke out in 1978, when, in his book Orientalism, Edward Said launched an attack on Western scholars and others for viewing the East – particularly the Middle East – through the distorting lens of imperialism and ethnocentrism. Rodinson, polite but critical, takes a more measured view. The great merit of ...”

“... Cabinet, which was where Dawson, the villain of this book, went wrong. Dawson intrigued to unseat Edward VIII (a good thing, as it happened, but none of his business) and was the architect of his newspaper’s appeasement-of-Hitler policy, his belief being that the Empire, in which he took an obsessive interest, was not at that stage fully behind ...”

“... An aside in an earlier essay shows that Strachey knew full well what he was doing. Referring to James Mill’s ‘treatment of the evidence’ on Warren Hastings, he added parenthetically: ‘and, in all history, the evidence must be “treated”.’ Selection and excision were necessary to the process of historical reconstitution, and Strachey learned to ...”