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“... them. They are rarely loved as much as Shakespeare’s sonnets or the verse of Jonson’s friend John Donne. His plays are a different matter. Among his contemporaries no dramatist other than Shakespeare has overtaken him. The depictions in his comedies of social and economic fantasy, and of their exploitation, have never seemed more pertinent than amid our ...”

“... ones thereafter with a yawn that becomes progressively harder to stifle as you reach the age of Major and Blair. The prime minister alone, as Hennessy reminds us, can activate the codes for a nuclear strike. The only one to authorise such a strike was Churchill: the 1943 Quebec Agreement meant that he had to give the go-ahead for Hiroshima and ...”

“... of the system undertaken to restore popular legitimacy. All three Reform Acts were followed by major legislative initiatives which tried to meet perceived popular demands. Each time there was alarm among conservatives, but the overwhelming effect was to reform the party system along cleaner, more functional lines and thus to energise and validate the ...”

“... by William Manchester, better known for his account of the assassination of his wartime friend, John F. Kennedy, Death of a President. Written in a racy, sometimes sensational style, the book was full of sweeping generalisations about Germany and the Germans, whom Manchester, not least because of his war experiences, clearly did not like. The Krupps were ...”

“... from which it has emanated’. He extended his evolutionism into ethics and religion in his last major book, Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, of 1932, where, for example, he compares two forms of morality: a morality of ‘pressure’, or social obligation, which is more or less static, is founded on habit or dumb acceptance of its rules and ...”

“... of New Labour. Every other country in the European Union, the ten prospective new entrants and major members of the Commonwealth such as India and Australia have written constitutions which define clearly and precisely the balance of power between the legislature, executive and judiciary. At a time when it has never been easier for the state to act ...”

“... as Kushner notes – lends itself to biography, which is why there have been at least two major ones in recent years: the pedestrian Life with Monte Cristo by Arthur and Barbara Gelb and Louis Sheaffer’s masterly Pulitzer Prize-winning two-volume account, O’Neill: Son and Playwright and O’Neill: Son and Artist. (Dowling’s biography frequently ...”

“... households; it is unequal, with a high Gini coefficient by European standards, and major disparities in health outcomes between classes and ethnicities; and it is a travel hub, with 23.7 million international arrivals in the first three months of 2020. In other words, the UK is crowded, old, fat, cramped, unequal and much visited, and all of ...”

“... and, simultaneously, the man who was Traven first moved tentatively out of the shadows. When John Huston set about filming The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1946, he woke one morning to see a small man standing in his Mexican hotel room, offering a card which introduced him as Hal Croves, Traven’s trusted agent. Croves worked for Huston as an ...”

“... a continuing record of high individual success: Tom, the pioneer in the discovery of photography; John the founder of the Royal Horticultural Society; and Josiah II, the head of a great family firm secure in the knowledge of its acknowledged fame and industrial leadership. All of these claimed achievements have something of a hollow ring when examined more ...”

“... union city into one in whose political and cultural life labour is only a shadowy presence. A major contribution to understanding the city’s past, Working-Class New York is also a milestone in American labour history. As in Britain, there was a remarkable transformation in this subject in the two decades after 1965. Inspired by the work of E.P. Thompson ...”

“... advocated, and blamed their failures on the dead weight of resistance at all levels of society. John Cook, Charles I’s prosecutor, said that ‘we would have enfranchised the people, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ William Sedgwick told the generals that ‘not one of a hundred will own what you set down as the public ...”

“... Commission (2012-13), chaired by a former clerk of the House of Commons. Meanwhile there have been major investigations in Scotland (the Calman Commission of 2007-8) and Wales – the Richard Commission (2002-4), the Holtham Commission (2007-10) and the Silk Commission (2011-14) – into the broader operation of devolution and the funding mechanisms that ...”

“... get what you pay for. Each concept has acquired constitutional legitimacy in its time – for, as John Griffith famously observed, the constitution is what happens. So when you pick up The New British Constitution and ask what new constitution that might be, one answer is that the British constitution, because it is always changing, is always new. But the ...”

“... The story of the burning of the Greatest Library of the Ancient World by the Arabs is well known: John the Grammarian, a Coptic priest living in Alexandria at the time of the Arab conquest in 641 AD, came to know ‘Amr, the Muslim general who conquered the city. The men were each other’s intellectual peers, and John became the Emir’s trusted adviser ...”