“... retaliation ...’ Here Mr Scruton’s nerve fails him a little. He has quoted with approval from Joseph de Maistre, the French arch-reactionary, but hesitates to follow him to the conclusion that the public hangman is the key figure of the social order. And this illuminates an emptiness at the core of this amazing book. It is, as he says at the outset, a ...”

“... organisation with anti-semitism and anti-Catholicism. Half a century later, Cobb County elected a John Bircher to Congress five times; it is now represented by Newt Gingrich. Although a 1967 Supreme Court decision finally overturned the Georgia state law that barred racial intermarriage, in 1986 the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia statute outlawing consensual ...”

“... is not a conventional history. It is not, for example, meant to compete with the standard work, John Ramsden’s volumes in the history of the Conservative Party, or with other histories which carry the story forward to the present day. It is rather an essay, or series of essays, on themes and issues with which Ian Gilmour was and is himself involved ...”

“... Gulbenkian suspected that if anyone knew the fate of Carnarvon’s collection, it would be Joseph Duveen, the well-connected dealer who dominated the interwar art market. But Duveen thought Gulbenkian’s tactics rather tactless and cabled from his London office that Gulbenkian might at least have waited until after the funeral. By the time the ...”

“... English classical scholarship to the European republic of letters. She regards him as the heir of Joseph Scaliger, himself a master of vast learning and of a prose style that could bring water to the eyes of his adversaries. Her early chapters show how much Bentley owed to the classical editors who preceded him in Cambridge, Thomas Stanley and Thomas ...”

“... series of highlights (Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, 1842-46), they were savaged by John Wilson Croker in the Tory Quarterly Review. Hatchet jobs were Croker’s speciality: it was his review of Endymion that Byron joked was the cause of Keats’s death in Don Juan (‘’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself be ...”

“... the ‘king bee’ was female coincided fortuitously with the reign of Queen Anne, enabling one Joseph Warder to publish, in 1712, his fawning book, The True Amazons, or The Monarchy of Bees: ‘I cannot but wish,’ he wrote, ‘that all your Majesty’s subjects were as unanimously loyal as the subjects of the Queen Bee, in whose Nature there is so ...”

“... was ascribed to Satan. In the first systematic treatise devoted to the topic, published in 1637, John Sym, a Puritan, was still able to attribute suicide to ‘the strong impulse, powerfull motions, and command of the Devill’. But natural causes were increasingly being blamed: melancholy, a dysfunction of the hypochondriac organs, folly, a foul ...”

“... of the future. Any decent cyberpunk library would include the novels of Sterling, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley and Lewis Shiner, along with the anthology Mirroshades, the casebook Storming the Reality Studio, and a growing number of academic studies like Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity. Bukatman pays extensive tribute to Gibson’s seminal role as he ...”

“... codes, other ranks chortled rhyming slang. A rabble was roused by, among others, the MI5 operative Joseph Ball, who moonlighted as the editor of Truth and coined the non-adhesive epithet ‘refu-spy’. The reliably squalid Daily Mail was, of course, active in this area. A correspondent, signed only ‘Brigadier, Eastbourne’, recommended that enemy aliens ...”

“... be disappointed. Born in 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the first surviving child of John and May Joyce, whose recent marriage had been fiercely opposed by both sets of parents. Their first baby, named after his father, had died at barely two months. The first healthy son was crucial affirmation for the marriage and, although 13 further births ...”

“... doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it. First, the zealots today are no longer the progressives on the left – liberals, socialists, trade unionists. Instead they are predominantly on ...”

“... Powell, whose ‘greatest regret was that [he] wasn’t killed in the war’, the batty Keith Joseph, the transparently pretentious Laurens van der Post, the relentlessly downmarket Norman Tebbit and Alfred Sherman who, though Jewish himself, risked his career to invite the notorious anti-semite Jean-Marie Le Pen to the Tory Conference. The clients ...”

“... parents as customers before 1998 (for every household that signs, the school receives £7.50). John Battle, Labour’s energy spokesman, told me that electricity and gas packages can now be bought from mailorder catalogues. The preservation of monopoly elements in both generation and supply has encouraged the febrile profit-making which we associate with ...”

“... cheer to the rafters each time Germany scored a goal. 8 June. Spot the typo, spare the blush. John Vincent writes from the University of Bristol: ‘In your memorable diaries you quote Disraeli’s view of May 1881, a month after his death. Would that other historians had access to such primary sources!’ 14 June. Alan Bennett’s letter to the LRB about ...”