“... notwithstanding the prince’s manifest lack of enthusiasm for ‘excruciating details’ about George VI’s diet. Shaw once said that Coriolanus was ‘Shakespeare’s greatest comedy’, on the grounds that we don’t sympathise with any of the characters, and there are moments on reading about the Blacks when one feels the same. The physically ...”

“... whole, and his good fortune now extends beyond the grave in the shape of this excellent biography. Michael Braddick is himself a distinguished historian of 17th-century England, the period that was the focus of practically all of Hill’s copious writings, and he is especially well versed in the debates surrounding the causes and character of the English Civil ...”

“... Laski (Briggs’s favourite), R.H. Tawney, Denis Brogan, Eileen Power and her Cambridge husband, Michael Postan. Briggs began to read Marx and the new subject of sociology. He was drifting leftwards, remarking (after the Soviet Union had joined the Allies) that a talk on the USSR by the socialist barrister D.N. Pritt was ‘a very good antidote to rotten USA ...”

“... with volumes devoted to the American ‘empire’. But how appropriate is this evocative term? Michael Mann has been working for two decades as ‘a historical sociologist on the nature of power in human societies’. In this dense and lively volume, composed ‘at breakneck speed’, he analyses and evaluates the main strands of US global influence, with ...”

“... as wide as 16 points. Corbyn is the most unpopular opposition leader on record, polling worse than Michael Foot, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband, all of whom went on to lose general elections by significant margins, or did not get to contest them. There are 230 Labour MPs; on 28 June, 172 of ...”

“... the ‘Men in White’ – has given way to an ever more circumscribed stratum, a process which Michael Barr, the leading historian of modern Singapore, examines in rich detail. The well-oiled pistons of the market-state are increasingly accompanied by the creaks and squabbles of a Chinese dynasty. The country’s prized state companies are overrun by ...”

“... was when I stayed to listen to the next lecture, ‘On Alleged Medical Negligence’, delivered by George Bonney, a laconic orthopaedic surgeon with long experience on the governing body of the Medical Defence Union. His tongue-in-cheek thesis was that the invention of penicillin had been a disaster for doctors, who until then had been unable to cure much ...”

“... linings – whether ecological or simply work-life balance – but will prompt panic among many. George Osborne likes to claim that Sunak’s spending programmes are only possible because he ‘fixed the roof while the sun was shining’. But the reverse is true: the underpreparedness of the NHS is due in part to the near total moratorium on capital spending ...”

“... in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out, that even in her death, Heyer was a beneficiary of white privilege, remembered as a ‘strong ...”

“... on the way to the Jallianwala Bagh. No officer of the Raj more candidly confirmed the truth of George Orwell’s confession in his essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’, written 17 years later, that his ‘whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at’. The horror of what happened that day sank in ...”

“... January 1789, when it caused a sensation. When one reads it now, in this excellent new edition by Michael Sonenscher, where it appears for the first time in English alongside the other pamphlets Sieyès wrote in 1788, it is still easy to see why. It is not a beautiful or polished piece of writing, it is poorly organised and it is probably too long for what it ...”

“... a potent and by no means always agreeable mixture of styles and showings-off, as if Stefan George had founded his clique not in a German castle but an English public school. The ‘discourse’ of Goodbye to all that is uneasy and aggressive, unstable while stiff-lipped-boastful. Graves had his Hemingway side too, the gender-muddled patriarch telling ...”

“... what was not harmonious’. She also wrote that the 19th-century novel was ‘a Judaised novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment’. Auden said that he had within him a ‘mad clergyman’, who often ...”

“... vignettes like Chatwin’s, humorous and on occasion startling. The best of them are memorable. Michael Ignatieff watches Chatwin ‘like an old baboon’ under a mulberry tree in the south of France, having his hair combed by his wife. The ravenous Francis Wyndham and James Fox spoon up a pitifully notional soufflé made from wild strawberries which they ...”

“... hacked about and generally sanitised before becoming the manifesto. The idea, I gather, was that Michael Foot himself was to do the job ... But either he was caught short by Mrs Thatcher’s abrupt decision, or had simply forgotten, or had found it all too much for him; at any event he arrived without anything to show, and the document simply became the ...”