“... crammed onto the walls (20 assorted 17th-century portraits are visible in this shot alone), and no trace of an information panel beyond the tiny labels perched under each picture. The second shows the same room after the Strong treatment. There are only six paintings to be seen now; the others have given way to a large slogan blazoning CIVIL WAR, a vast ...”

“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th century, in ...”

“... There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,’ said King Duncan in the fourth scene of Macbeth. But there was, and Shakespeare knew this. Almost at the moment he was writing the play, a new law required that anybody who professed ‘a knowledge of phisnognomie’ – one version of the name by which the practice of reading character in facial features was known to the learned – was to be ‘openly whipped untill his body be bloudye ...”

“... as the saying goes, could scarcely organise a piss-up in a brewery? The Edwardian pioneers had no settled leader (the SDP has sound scriptural precedent here): Keir Hardie’s talents were other than those of a Parliamentary chairman; Arthur Henderson was dull; Ramsay MacDonald was both great orator and skilled tactician, though his critics within the ...”

“... to 1909, Lyndsey Jenkins writes in her sympathetic and extremely well-told account, ‘had given no hint of the rebellion to come’. She threw stones, agitated, got arrested and starved herself. She may not have been a charismatic leader in the Pankhurst mould, but she provided the movement with one of its boldest acts when she had herself arrested ...”

“... Democratic politics since 1960, when, at the age of twelve, he sported a large campaign button for John F. Kennedy. Until recently he was a co-editor of Dissent, which prides itself on being the nation’s oldest democratic socialist magazine. His previous books include The Populist Persuasion (1995), an illuminating analysis which predated the recent ...”

“... then warned Chamberlain against the danger of a possible Nazi-Soviet pact, something almost no one else foresaw); he was also a man of courage and conscience, with a range of intellectual gifts and a degree of cultivation unmatched by any other 20th-century premier. He won the Military Cross in 1916 for risking his life by carrying his wounded ...”

“... and arrived at Oxford in 1853 a fervent Tractarian: he dreamed of following in the footsteps of John Henry Newman or even joining a monastic brotherhood. The spiritual intensity of his Oxford phase and the dream of brotherhood never left him, but the appeal of the church gradually faded; by the time he set out for London three years later, the disciple of ...”

“... a slothful desire for an easy life, was understandably exasperated by the Ulster problem – but no more so than a long line of politicians, before and since. Churchill – not so easily depicted as a faint-heart – lamented in the aftermath of the First World War that, while the cataclysm had transformed the rest of Europe, the Ulster question remained as ...”

“... of the previous generation, he or she might well have mentioned, alongside Darwin and John Stuart Mill, the name of Sir Henry Maine, the subject of Karuna Mantena’s valuable new study. His name isn’t heard much anymore, but in his own day Maine (1822-88) was regarded as a towering public intellectual. He became regius professor of civil law at ...”

“... 1930 that listeners who tuned in to the BBC for the 6.30 evening news bulletin heard: ‘There is no news tonight.’ Piano music filled the hiatus before the next programme. In the same year the BBC’s Variety Programmes and Policy Guide for Writers and Producers stated: Programmes must at all costs be kept free of crudities. There can be ...”

“... Williams turned out to be a fugitive husband and absentee father. As a refuge from the pram in the hall, he became involved with A.E. Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, an offshoot of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and would often don his secret robes to pass through some initiation or other. His wife was left out of these occult rites, as she was ...”

“... muted. Where the prisoner’s statement had once been the centrepiece of the defence, it was now no more than grist for the learned disputations of the experts. Eigen’s starting date of 1760 marks the first time that specialist medical evidence was summoned to adjudicate insanity in an English courtroom, but the case that really launches his narrative is ...”

“... lover Laurie Lee went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, she sent him pound notes soaked in Chanel No. 5. Nancy Morris, who wore the cast-off suits of the Soho restaurateur Marcel Boulestin, would have brought a dash of something altogether different. ‘She is absolutely uncultured,’ her lover Alix Strachey explained. In the end, alongside HD, Sayers and ...”

“... and laudable pastimes’. It all sounds rather Calvinistic. For all the concrete detail, there’s no place like Utopia. More weaves that joke into the book’s title. Ou topos is ‘not a place’ (but compare eu topos, ‘good place’); in Republic Plato contrasted his utopia avant la lettre, ‘Kallipolis’, the beautiful or fine city, with a banausic ...”