“... gave ‘Reform’ MPs a defining political cause and a leader under whom they could rally: Lord John Russell, dubbed by Parry ‘the greatest Liberal statesman of his age’. Over the next forty years, the Whig-Liberal Party developed a distinct set of policies and, more importantly, an idiosyncratic approach to public life. As might have been expected from ...”

“... the Heseltine campaign for leader in 1990 – Clark, the tycoon James Goldsmith and the zoo-keeper John Aspinall arranged a dinner with Conrad Black, owner of the Telegraph, to try to persuade him to order his (entirely independent) editor to stop backing Heseltine. Black refused, but we are left in no doubt that it is at dinner parties such as these that ...”

“... Wars, and much less, provoke vehement disagreement. There are only a few ‘upright men’ (John Heilbron’s word for Max Planck in The Dilemmas of an Upright Man) who are able to cope with contradictions in an effort to achieve some sort of balance and perspective even under the most trying circumstances. Wallace is by no means a cynic, however, and ...”

“... on conclusions reached in the book I had written. I don’t want to interfere with a discussion by John Bayley which the paper will be publishing shortly: but I would like to diarise a little about this piece of Antipodean duality. Like other strange stories of the genre, it both embodies and attracts coincidence. A strong pang was felt when my eye travelled ...”

“... He added that ‘the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, beconceded to the laws of scansion.’ But this is so ludicrous thatit is almost certainly a joke. Indeed, where geniality stops and grimness starts in Babbage is a question that has puzzled students of his personality. The last biography of him was called Irascible Genius, but Mr ...”

“... presented by Baroness Joan Vickers to the House of Lords in 1977 – is for the abolition of all laws relating to prostitution. But, yet again, it is not simple. Do I personally want to let my spare room to a prostitute? No, not as long as I can get any other tenant. But this ‘legal’ trade – and we would be even deeper into hypocrisy if we tried to ...”

“... about riding-masters, and therefore is afflicted by rentier-guilt. (‘Recurrent as malaria,’ John Lehmann wrote in 1955, ‘a bout of rentier-guilt laid me low.’) Because Auden’s ideal or preferred or postulated reader has this socio-political identity, he is particularly easy to recognise; Trotter’s ingenuity and sensitivity are more taxed when ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at his own expense. Poor Pronek. At least three people he passes have a copy of Seven Spiritual Laws of Growth (is this title ever so slightly unlikely?); he is continually asked what he thinks of the baseball scene, and whether America isn’t the best country in the world. His initial answer to the last question is ‘I don’t know, I just ...”

“... stuff of animated cartoons, which did not accept the world as it was – or even acknowledge the laws of physics. Cartoons provided a means for technology to oppose itself; at the very least, they might provide an ‘inoculation against mass psychoses’. And cartoons were funny. By evoking collective laughter with their open exploration of ‘sadistic ...”

“... and Hispanic voters to turn out in unprecedented numbers. He did better among white voters than John Kerry had in 2004, but not by much: Kerry got 41 per cent, Obama 43 per cent. The brunt of the recession has been borne by precisely those groups that supported Obama most: blacks, Hispanics and the young. (In 2008, the 18-29 age group, which usually ...”

“... However, everything at Summerhill – where lessons are voluntary and the pupils invent their own laws – is put to a vote, and the children decided they wanted to keep the tepee for themselves. So for the summer of 1993 I lived in a bed and breakfast in Leiston. All the other guests worked for Sizewell B: every piece of crockery and all the towels and ...”

“... a century of nearly ceaseless warfare. The first era of easy money began after English usury laws were amended in 1714 to allow no lending over 5 per cent; in France rates fell even lower. Two of the first modern crises caused by the bursting of asset bubbles followed shortly afterwards, when the Mississippi and South Sea Companies collapsed in 1720.By ...”

“... with anarchism? The Dadaists would be a good guess, but the truly political ones, such as John Heartfield and George Grosz, were communists, and since the early days of Proudhon and Marx anarchists and communists have been more rivals than comrades. The ultra-composed Neo-Impressionists aren’t obvious angels of chaos, yet Georges Seurat, Camille ...”

“... The old way of running schools was that one big hub – central government – sent out money and laws and regulations to 152 smaller hubs, the local authorities, who then passed them on to clusters of little cogs, the schools. It was all fairly orderly. The new system, on the other hand, is chaotic. Central government throws out cash and ...”