“... regional power bases, which the early modern tsars were trying to turn into a reliable service class. An elaborate ‘place’ system (mestnichestvo) determined a boyar’s exact rank for honorific and ceremonial purposes. Patron-client relationships were crucial in politics and every other aspect of life. Collective responsibility – on the part of a ...”

“... of abstract constitutional theories on American or French lines, which had led to civil war and revolution. Instead Bagehot showed the practical benefits of the apparently illogical mix of crown, cabinet and parliamentary authority. In 1860 he described Parliament as ‘the most efficient instrument for expressing the practical opinion of cultivated ...”

“... comes to history. The issues on which pro-Brexit Conservatives seem most keen to fight a culture war are those that have to do with violence, masculinity and war: whether or not to prosecute British soldiers for past crimes, what to teach schoolchildren about the British Empire, how to commemorate the ...”

“... about the subjects that interested him – the conflict of civilisations, the march of barbarism, class, aesthetics, Roman Catholicism – still possess bite and pertinence. His despair at the condition of 20th-century man, much ridiculed at the time, now seems merely prescient. But he did not arrive at these beliefs by contemplation. Pious he may have ...”

“... has happened to ‘making’, though, since E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Thompson’s title tells us that his subject is a discrete historical process, class-making. In the book, he’ll specify the large forces at work in that making – ...”

“... the origins in the complacencies engendered, and the conservatism confirmed, in the Second World War: the war’s effect, in Angus Calder’s ringing words, ‘was not to sweep society on to a new course, but to hasten its progress along the old grooves’. Some have placed them as late as the conservative reaction against ...”

“... wars with England between the end of the 13th century and the 1540s. As an example of the waste of war, it seemed to retain its relevance for later generations. Like many other Scottish battles, it has its own song (written much later): The Flooers of the Forest, that focht aye the foremost The prime o our land, lie cauld in the clay. Historians have sometimes ...”

“... released under the thirty-year rule. Whitehall, as we know from the history of the Second World War, has never had much faith in ordinary people. The idea that the public is a backward tribe in need of ‘re-education’ is a trifle patronising. But most of us would agree that a government trying to ‘take Britain into Europe’ had a public relations ...”

“... We shall know more about the origins of the English Civil War when we know more about English Puritans. This seems, on the face of it, an absurd proposition. From S.R. Gardiner’s confident description of the Great Rebellion as ‘the Puritan Revolution’ downwards, we have not lacked studies which linked Protestant religious attitudes to the coming of the Civil War ...”

“... the dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound and 205 members of the law school’s 1927 graduating class. Interest in the case did not die with the men’s executions. It has been the subject of countless books, articles and TV documentaries, it has also inspired novels and films, and even came up on The Sopranos, cited by Tony and Carmela Soprano to their ...”

“... the usual lazy caricature of the sour-faced, high-minded left. He is easily irritated by talk of class conflict, and is not exactly in congratulatory mood when he calls John Carey the most class-conscious critic of the modern age. (The literary hackles raised by Carey’s recent memoir, The Unexpected Professor, which puts ...”

“... life – everyone watching everyone else. Gossip is saturated with disapproval, resentment, class hierarchy; everybody’s ranked according to their job, their education, which church they go to, what their family name betrays about them. Some celebrate ancestors who came over with the Pilgrims, others are Irish Catholics, or ...”

“... of the mid-19th-century European imagination as are Middlemarch, L’Education Sentimentale, and War and Peace. Whatever it was that condemned Galdos to international neglect, it was certainly not insularity of outlook. For British readers the case is particularly ironic. The author of Fortunata and Jacinta modelled himself on Balzac and Scott and on his ...”

“... of seats in each of the constituent parts of Great Britain – as it has since the Second World War. The Lib Dems won nearly a quarter of the votes (more than last time) but only 57 seats (five fewer than last time). The Labour and Conservative Parties are now in effect regional parties. Labour is the party of the inner cities (London included) and ...”

“... long, published by HMSO as part of the official history of the home front during the Second World War, and it addresses, with unyielding attention to detail, such topics as the exact division of administrative responsibilities for the provision of ambulance and other first-aid services during the war. Much of his later work ...”