“... however apparently trivial’. For instance, there was the ritual of the cigarette-case: ‘It held, I suppose, ten cigarettes; but to see JB select one you might think that each had a separate and distinct personality. His hand would hover above the open case for an appreciable time before the choice was made, and the cigarette chosen was by no means ...”

“... CND, his contempt for the New English Bible, his delight in nude bathing, and his belief that if David Owen had stayed in the Labour Party he would have become its leader. All his columns were eagerly followed, but one series excited particular attention. He reported that his wife, the Hungarian historian Eva Haraszti, was in hospital, and chronicled the ...”

“... In September 1992, David Mellor resigned from the government after concern over an extra-marital affair and a free holiday in Europe. An affair also accounted for Mr Tim Yeo in early 1994. Soon after this resignation, Lord Caithness resigned following the suicide of his wife, which apparently was the result of an affair he had been conducting ...”

“... United States. He was shocked by American coffee, but calmly prepared for the MLA. ‘J’ai lu David Lodge,’ he boasted, brandishing his tattered copy of Small World. For the first time in 110 years, the MLA held its December meeting in balmy and palmy San Diego instead of frost-bitten Chicago, Toronto or New York. The ...”

“... of Liberals and Marxists alike, while the New Right delights in a pedigree which reaches back to David Hume and Adam Smith. In the United States scholars have established the influence of Francis Hutcheson, Hume and Smith on the American Revolution and the making of the Constitution. This view has been widely disseminated – to the liberal left by Garry ...”

“... Neo-Romantic illustrators, Keith Vaughan and John Minton excelled. Minton decorated Elizabeth David’s first book, A Book of Mediterranean Food with tipsy Breton sailors, market girls, lobster pots, fruits de mer, as a kind of delicious ballet in and out of the dedicated text. As Wright says, when you take up a book published by Lehmann you get the sense ...”

“... responded as he always did, by raising the stakes. He lobbied Congress. He revived a long-held plan to buy the Tour de France – not to bribe the authorities, but actually to purchase the whole damn thing – so that he could run the race his way (he needed to raise $1.5 billion, a figure that eventually proved beyond even him). He hired the best ...”

“... dominant American politician without a shadow of rivalry. If the next presidential election were held today, he would be the Republican nominee and he would probably win. A Gallup poll on 18 June showed him at 45 per cent approval; this dropped a notch or two after the Helsinki debacle; but Rasmussen (a more accurate predictor of the 2016 election) now has ...”

“... The fifth annual Battle of Ideas was held over a weekend last October at the Royal College of Art in West London. There was a route you could do, a circuit, up the stairs at one end of the windowless basement and down them again at the other, and I did it many times, bag dragging at my back. Each day was divided into five time-slots, each slot into ‘strands’: the Battle for Energy, Battle for Work, Battle for Reproductive Choice; or Breakfast Banter, Café Controversies, Bookshop Barnie ...”

“... a society to study social questions (though it appears to have met only once). But Tawney, who held a classical scholarship, received glowing reports in his first year and clearly loved his time at Oxford, appears to have assumed he would get a first and slide effortlessly into the life of an Oxford don. When he didn’t, that future was suddenly closed to ...”

“... government team. The old image of the SNP as ‘wild amateurs’ or ‘a one-man band’ no longer held true. It used to be Labour that could campaign on its record in office. But now, for the first time, it was Labour – stripped of leadership talent by internal vendettas and the lure of Westminster – that seemed unfamiliar, untried. The ancient weapon ...”

“... have always faced the problem that, contrary to what Mr Podsnap thought, it cannot simply be held up to the light and admired. The constitution is simultaneously a description of how, for the moment, we are governed and a prescriptive account of how we ought to be governed. In both respects (the former much more than the latter) it undergoes constant ...”

“... four generations. This rejected the understanding of Christianity as creed, not lineage, that had held for more than a millennium. The king and the pope both opposed the restrictions, yet they were widely adopted across Spain and then Portugal, especially after a later, Spanish pope, Alexander VI, approved blood purity statutes in 1495. By the end of the 15th ...”

“... in which Labour was now indisputably the main opposition party. A chairmanship contest was held between MacDonald and J.R. Clynes, who, serving as a competent minister in the Lloyd George war coalition, had at that time been tipped by the Observer as a future Labour prime minister. MacDonald was elected chairman and leader, as the press at the ...”

“... described how Californian administrators were exposed to ‘Mau-Mauing’, a mock-demonstration held far away from the ghetto audience but within reach of a City Hall which was to give money in aid. And Murray Edelman, in a book entitled Politics as Symbolic Action, has contrasted the public belligerence of union leaders with the private quiet of ...”