“... less fanciful Edinburgh partners, RMJM. The attack on the Twin Towers imposed additional costs to do with improving security and strengthening the building. Above all, it was impossible to meet all the published objectives of the Holyrood project – a significant building in a central site, built to a tight timeframe and giving value for the ...”

“... and racist prejudices – lurking in the neglected penumbra of American liberalism: ‘How do Americans get around all their constitutional safeguards and repress rivals, strangers and scary others? Morality. We are bound to honour our fellow citizens and their rights, unless the neighbours turn out to be bad. Then they can be – and often are ...”

“... Sir David Dalrymple predicted that ‘Mr Charles Townshend will make a very indifferent compagnon de voyage out of a very able professor of ethics.’ In particular, Smith, who was to take his young charge first of all to Paris, to smooth his manners, had ‘so bad an ear’, according to Dalrymple, that ‘he will never learn to express himself intelligibly ...”

“... coalitions. Only very occasionally, when the whips are thwarted by force of circumstance, do the voters – and indeed a frustrated cadre of pragmatic and independent-minded politicians – escape the iron cage of partisan constraint. In early 1974 Britain seemed divided and ungovernable, with Ted Heath’s Conservative government blown off course by ...”

“... domesticate Bryan’s populism. Runciman warns us not to look for the familiar symbols of the coup d’état – tanks in the streets, generals seizing television and radio stations – as the heralds of the death of democracy. The transition is likely to be much less cartoonish, and consequently harder to detect or guard against. Indeed, the phenomenon he ...”

“... with significant democratic breakthroughs ‘followed by complete democratic breakdowns or coups d’état’. Democratisation took a more sedate course in Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, where – despite some resistance and occasional hazards – there was steady incremental progress towards settled democracy. Old ...”

“... Since the 1960s, social historians have made enormous efforts to expand the range of history beyond the familiar cast of monarchs, courtiers and parliamentarians to recover the lives of the lower orders. ‘History from below’ has complicated and enriched the national story: witches and wet nurses, Ranters and Muggletonians, autodidacts, knitters and servants have all emerged from the shadows of neglect and condescension ...”

“... was not just the doing of Sinn Féin, but was supported by the somewhat priggish middle-class do-gooders of Alliance, a political party which has traditionally floated consequence-free above the streetfighting of proletarian Ulster. On this occasion, however, loyalist protesters chose to single out Alliance for facilitating the outrage. The party offices ...”

“... of the non-Western world was not yet a fact of the global economy. Drawing on the work of Jan de Vries, Bayly emphasises the multiple centres of ‘industrious revolution’ across Eurasia based on indigenous artisanal industries in South and East Asia and specialised local dominance of lucrative trades in precious commodities such as tea and spices. Some ...”

“... place an excessive value on the importance of texts – the tradition of Great Books – but do a major disservice to the works they claim to prize. Sometimes the damage is limited to partial, incomplete readings, but at its worst Straussianism can result in a gross miscategorisation of author and text. Despite this, Mansfield’s work is immensely ...”

“... the role of ‘the American Cicero or Demosthenes’, found they ‘had more important things to do’ on the floor of the Continental Congress. Jefferson’s draft betrays an anxious, casuistical triangulation. Even as Congressmen prepared to cast off their allegiance to George III, they felt compelled to delete a passage which mixed together ‘an implicit ...”

“... the Bourbons get Frenchmen to fight for them against Frenchmen?’ The great powers could only do so much if the restored Bourbons could not rely on the loyalty of their subjects. The world was not endlessly malleable, and could not be remade to conform to the mould of reactionary fantasists. Castlereagh grumbled privately about the ‘sublime mysticism ...”

“... unlike the Liberals, as a competitive alternative to an emergent Labour movement, and then to do whatever was required to win elections and to flourish – against the expected run of play – for much of the 20th century as the dominant party of government. Yet after 1990 the Conservatives appeared to have a death wish, the compulsion to ...”

“... share of the vote than the 30.4 per cent it attained in the October 1974 general election. How do we explain the coexistence of apathy, unionism and genuine nationalist enthusiasm? During the referendum campaign Donald Dewar, the Secretary of State for Scotland, presented devolution as a plan to secure the Union; put another way, in the partisan words of ...”

“... of the democratic West. Yet Wolfowitz’s career does not quite fit the caricature of a Straussian Dr Strangelove. His doctoral thesis dealt with the apparently arcane topic of nuclear-powered desalination plants, arguing that they opened up a path to nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Curiously, given his current stance, the young Wolfowitz was just as ...”