“... much more memorable) story. David Hughes’s The Pork Butcher is a worthy winner of the W.H. Smith award, the latest of the series of literary prizes awarded to novels published in 1984. In this, his ninth novel, Hughes has written a moral fable, brief, sensational, and hauntingly tense. The word ‘haunting’ is used advisedly. Ghost stories, with ...”

“... the London 2012 Olympics, was appointed ‘PPE tsar’ in April. The Cabinet Office minister Chloe Smith was a Deloitte consultant before becoming MP for Norwich North at the age of 27. The owner of a small consultancy recently told me what happened when he went to Whitehall a few months before the pandemic to discuss a potential research project. A special ...”

“... Henry Adams reports in his autobiography that at a dinner at the American Embassy at which John Bright was the chief British guest, he thumped the table and announced: ‘the English are a nation of brutes and should be exterminated to the last man.’ This statement shocked Henry Adams, James Russell Lowell, the Minister, and the other Americans ...”

“... and the distinctive Scottish tradition of philosophy stemming from Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith which had helped to produce Carlyle also represented an older and perhaps even more fundamental influence on American academic and intellectual life. Seventeenth-century Puritanism in England and America and the covenanting Calvinism of Carlyle’s ...”

“... which of them were homosexuals and so on, Cornish dodgily assuming, as did Andrew Boyle and John Costello before him, that homosexuality is itself a bond and that if two men can be shown to be homosexual the likelihood is that they’re sleeping together. So we trail down that road looking for cliques and coteries with even G.M. Trevelyan’s sexual ...”

“... victims, who kept on being willing no matter how they were treated. Miller cites the case of John McMaster, at one time ‘first Pope of the Church of Scientology’, who later fell into disfavour. McMaster, he says, now speaks of Hubbard with enormous bitterness, always calling him ‘Fatty’. When Hubbard had him thrown overboard one day (only in ...”

“... shock of his election, that we’re all actually married to him, and living inside his house. In John Ford’s morbid late Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the sociopathic highwayman Liberty Valance, played by Lee Marvin, senses an instability in the American recipe wherein law-abiding civilisation (represented by Jimmy Stewart) and wilful ...”

“... casualty rate was astonishing. Historians’ estimates range from 37 per cent (Jonathan Riley-Smith) to as high as 75 per cent (John France), with illness and starvation causing more deaths than combat. Women faced the additional hazard of pregnancy, which could be life-threatening at the best of times, and, like ...”

“... of History’ is a case in point. Herbert Butterfield slew it in 1931, and here come John Pocock and Jonathan Clark to slay it again. There is next to nothing in common between them, save their opposition to the Whig Interpretation and its offspring: but it is that opposition which provides both of them with the structure of their argument and ...”

“... which didn’t quite fit. The story of attorney Cromwell’s mission to Rome was first told by John Foxe in Actes and Monumentes, the ‘Book of Martyrs’. Foxe had to rescue his hero with some deft literary footwork, turning on its head the uncomfortable tale of Cromwell’s journey to the heart of Roman superstition and error. Elizabethan Protestants ...”

“... the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Donald Trump’s (then) chief of staff, John Kelly, went on Fox News and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.’ Kelly’s ...”

“... peglegs: all press-ganged upstream with Adam Dalgleish’s impersonator, Roy Marsden, for the Long John Silver show at the Mermaid. James is left with a heritage trail of selective quotations, a London Dungeon of waxwork crimes exhibited in authentic locations. This is an empty set, a set defined by its architecture (where even Mandy the Temp, in her ...”

“... the treatment meted out by the medical profession to the young shell-shock victim Septimus Warren Smith, Clarissa’s dark double: insanity to her sanity, death to her life. In the novel, the cold fury climaxes in a lengthy denunciation of the will-to-power manifest in the Harley Street specialist Sir William Bradshaw’s worship of the twin ...”

“... of these standards by inviting in the companies which set them. It is the old gamble of Adam Smith: we must rely on the greed of the tradesman, not on his benevolence, with the further assumption that this greed can be benign if it is contained within the rule of law which protects private property and market relations. Greed is beginning to flourish in ...”

“... affected to some degree, and looked for an explanation. ‘She called out to the country,’ Elton John sang at the funeral. But may it not have been the English Rose’s country which, in the aftermath of loss, ceased being able to call out in a traditional way? If so, a call long responded to – not really ‘down the ages’ but for quite a long ...”