“... Reading this Life of Lloyd George is like watching one of those old James Cagney movies where it’s established early on that the protagonist isn’t simply an anti-hero but, for all that he’s lionised, an irredeemable villain. The fun comes from watching him get away with all sorts of caddishness early on and then carry on the virtuoso act long after everyone has got his number ...”

“... type of liberal democracy in which the oligarchs have been enjoying a free run’. When both Peter Mandelson and George Osborne find themselves compromised by their inability to avoid the company of unaccountable freebooters like Oleg Deripaska and Nat Rothschild it makes British democracy seem not so much corrupt as incompetent and weak. The politicians ...”

“... him as ‘modern’ from the start; the greatest work of classical republican theory in English, James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (published in 1656), was written as a direct refutation of the ‘modern prudence’ of Leviathan. Hobbes subsequently looms in the emergence of modern scientific and philosophical inquiry – in Susan ...”

“... as the Cambridge School, inaugurated a contextualist revolution. The school’s founding father, Peter Laslett, pointed out the errors and anachronisms of political philosophers who paid no attention to the genesis of the texts they studied. Although Locke’s Two Treatises of Government wasn’t published until after the Glorious Revolution of ...”

“... unable to raise the revenue to pay the crews. After the Restoration in 1660, both Charles II and James II demonstrated enthusiasm and expertise in nurturing naval expansion. But the Royal Navy’s performance in the Second and Third Dutch Wars was uneven, and political and religious divisions among its officers and men enabled William III and the Dutch fleet ...”

“... Since they also sing the praises of meekness as a political virtue, they are unlikely to prove Peter Mandelson’s favourite reading. Bobbio distinguishes four kinds of relation between ethics and politics. There are two brands of monism which respectively reduce ethics to politics (Hobbes) and politics to ethics (Erasmus, Kant); a more flexible form of ...”

“... paid for the upkeep of a marsupial in 1611? William Walker, keeper of fowl at the menagerie in St James’s Park, was paid five shillings a month to care for England’s first recorded opossum. What was the customs duty on an emu in 1801? Joseph Banks narrowly avoided customs duty ad valorem – duty based on market value – on three of them, which would ...”

“... purpose’ than as a brief hiatus from ‘algorithmic citizenship’ (as the artist and writer James Bridle refers to our profiling by FAANG, aka Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google). In his​ earlier work Paglen approached the security apparatus from afar; in his recent projects he attempts to get inside its mechanisms. In this he follows the ...”

“... it is an eirenic exploration, in which he never speaks unkindly of his rivals – for example, Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads – or of the dozen other new or newish books listed on Amazon that have ‘Silk Roads’ as part of their title; the topographical section of the London Library has a whole Silk Roads shelf. This is evidently an idea ...”

“... tenants. The Gregory clause was ‘a charter for land clearance and consolidation’, according to Peter Gray. ‘The substantial rise in evictions after 1847 was attributed largely to its introduction,’ according to Christine Kinealy. For the tenants whose potato crop had failed and whose families were starving, the Gregory clause was a nightmare. As a ...”

“... even Neville Chamberlain might have blushed. We learn this not from Blair’s memoirs, but from Peter Mandelson’s, which provide a much more complete account of the Blair/Brown relationship (they are also much easier to read, since Mandelson has no problem telling his story in chronological order).* Mandelson reveals that Blair frequently pledged to ‘do ...”

“... snobs and sports are by no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a ...”

“... shows how the ‘carnivalesque’ was harnessed to official ideologies under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that the play’s formal involutions reflect, not transcendent truths about illusion ...”

“... of song. Many of her poems seem to ask to be set to music by Delius, Vaughan Williams, Finzi or Peter Warlock; especially those about peopled and unpeopled landscapes, the first cuckoo in Spring, faith gained or lost, and doves come flying. As if waiting for them to be set, she gives them a provisional music of her own, in keeping with the sentiment that we ...”

“... and Edward Fugion, did a thoroughly professional job in following the Irish revolutionary priest James O’Coigley and tracing his associates. In a delightfully libellous caricature by Isaac Cruikshank the runners were imagined not only as a formidable anti-radical force but as a force of nature. It shows Charles James Fox ...”