“... a Panel on Fair Access to the Professions, chaired by Alan Milburn, a cabinet minister during the Blair years, and it has published its conclusions in a report entitled Unleashing Aspiration. The panel’s task was to ‘help ensure that everyone, including those on moderate and middle incomes as well as the wealthiest, has a fair chance to access careers in ...”

“... is enshrouded in seventy years of mythologising, but no less impressive for that. As John D. Kelly has emphasised, a Singaporean cultural identity was forged within a decade: Malays in Singapore went overnight from being the Bumiputera – the chosen sons of the soil – to a minority; Indians had to forget memories of their prowess in the Indian ...”

“... wave of appointees also included one who was, in the words of an admirer, Europe’s equivalent of John Marshall, the patriarch of the Supreme Court in the US, responsible for establishing its authority across the land. Robert Lecourt was a leading politician in the French version of the Christian Democratic parties of Italy and Germany, the Mouvement ...”

“... Proms. Think Morning Service at the village church, carols from King’s College Cambridge, Elton John singing to the nation from Westminster Abbey. Think popular music in general and, when Plato brings in a parallel from the visual arts, forget the Tate Gallery and recall the advertisements that surround us everywhere. Above all, think about the way all this ...”

“... of the term suddenly soared in the late 1990s, multiplying sixty times over and becoming, as John Gillingham, an economic historian attached to its earlier sense, remarked, ‘the current euphemism for overthrowing foreign governments’.Yet the relevance of its original meaning remains. Neoliberalism has not gone away. Its hallmarks are now ...”

“... themselves into trouble. Last year, Jo Shuter, the former head of Quintin Kynaston Academy in St John’s Wood, was banned from teaching after admitting to widespread misuse of public funds – using school money for taxis, phones and a great many flowers, plus £7000 for her 50th birthday party and £8269 for a boutique-hotel jolly for senior staff. The ...”

“... were in the stronger position. In 2000, TNT had become so powerful relative to Royal Mail that the Blair government held secret talks about merging the British postal service with, or selling it to, its Dutch rival. That deal fell through. But the regime put in place by New Labour in 2000 to expose Royal Mail to competition had a curious effect. Whereas other ...”

“... X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in ...”

“... Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both constitutional explanations of the Caroline crisis, and class interpretations of the Civil War, these histories ...”

“... of those who wished it so. They had lived through what complacent historians in the West like John Lewis Gaddis called the ‘Long Peace’ of postwar Europe, but which for them was an unbroken long war of fifty years, starting with the Soviet invasion of the Baltic states in August 1939, before Hitler attacked Poland, and ending only with the fall of the ...”

“... London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state.’ He was as good as ...”

“... Hong Kong. A clever scholarship boy of Irish ancestry who grew up in West London, he shares with John Major a modest show-business background – his father published a pop hit, ‘She Wears Red Feathers and a Hooly Hooly Skirt’. ‘We were low-to-lower middle class. I can describe these gradations with laserlike accuracy,’ Patten told his New Yorker ...”

“... betting shop in Tufnell Park. Two things​ happened to change this. The first was the decision of John Major’s government to introduce a national lottery in 1994. At a stroke it became impossible for the government to maintain its position that gambling should not be stimulated by advertising, since it was now determined to advertise its own product. The ...”

“... it was very reassuring but also a bit ominous.’The Irish Sea: ‘Fish don’t do borders’ (John Lynch, a fisherman, quoted in the Irish Times, 14 December 2018).Jeremy Corbyn: ‘Delusional’ (Irish Independent, 12 December 2018). ‘The fact that there has been no leadership from Corbyn on Brexit will be something the party and the country may rue ...”