“... have guaranteed this tiny fringe grouping a modest amount of media exposure. The minority parties do not merely bring colour to the electoral process. In a close-run election, the seats they win might well determine which of the main parties leads the governing coalition. Solidarity and the Scottish Socialists both favour an independent Scottish republic, but ...”

“... Despite​ Theresa May’s calls during the election campaign for national unity, Britons don’t really live in a nation-state but in a multinational composite state, whose lineaments were set in the period between the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which established the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, and the Hanoverian accession in 1714. With the defeat of Catholic supporters of the deposed James II in Ireland – then a subordinate kingdom belonging to England – in 1690, sectarian divisions, which foreshadow the differences between today’s Ulster unionists and Irish nationalists, became more deeply entrenched ...”

“... Captain Kidd, though by no means the most successful of the pirates, was certainly the best-known. His name means piracy to this day, and it is a little strange to see it used in the title of the present book as though he took part in this war on the virtuous side. Yet such is the case. Robert Kidd appeared on the recorded scene in 1689 at the age of about 44, as one of the crew of a buccaneering ship in the West Indies ...”

“... has been burned away in the refining fire of bibliographical theory. On the other side John Kidd champions an imperfect but historically authentic Ulysses, a book produced partly by genius, partly by accident, partly by the exigencies of the printing-shop. In matters of wording and punctuation, the differences between one Ulysses and the other are ...”

“... Colin Kidd’s study of Scottish Unionism goes, as he himself insists, sternly against the prevailing ideological current, which is focused on the emergence of political nationalism in both Scotland and Wales. Kidd thinks his book will serve its purpose if it unsettles this debate, and brings about a revision of ‘the basic categories of political analysis ...”

“... as subversive as ever, I see. Me: I always had a visceral hatred of New Labour. Reid: If we’d listened to people like you the Tories would have been in power for another 13 years. Me: They were. Just called themselves New Labour. Tariq Ali Within a year or two we will remember the engagement interviews featuring Messrs Cameron and Clegg with the same ...”

“... men. She is pleased by an encounter with a tattooed decorator who asks: ‘What does a historian do?’ He doesn’t get an immediate answer, but this book gives some clues. Some of her accounts – of attendance at lectures, of Hungarian and British history, of English churches – are dry. Many of her notes are Alancentric: ‘Isis is an undergraduate ...”

“... from the biblical curse of Noah to the quasi-scientific concept of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) which prevailed in the Spanish Empire. The question of how, exactly, these intellectual influences shaped social and political action is harder to fathom, especially in the more autonomous societies of the British Atlantic. James Walvin’s new book ...”

“... Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more ...”

“... Polling day​ , which we’d waited for in a fervour, was odd and quiet. Mist pressed at the windows. I felt convalescent and washed out, and fair enough, for the last ten days I’d been living on a mix of Facebook and Nytol – Facebook because you can be everywhere at once and the ‘official’ media had been solidly and relentlessly Unionist ...”

“... Jacob’s birthday till about five (or rather Hetta and Walter were and I was hanging about): then Kidd and his wife turned up and we all set out to look at the celebration of the new Government and capital. There was supposed to be a difficulty about getting sanluerhs, but we did and Hetta and I at once got separated from the others because our drivers went ...”

“... narrator, Jamie Greenhalgh, the brother of a model, waking up next to someone he thinks is Jodie Kidd (she isn’t, incidentally). The chapter proceeds by alternating an account of what happens that morning with flashbacks to events of the night before. ‘Call yourself a New Puritan?’ the reader may well indignantly ask, but this isn’t really breaking ...”

“... of the night on a date just before Christmas the previous year, climbed through the window of A.G. Kidd & Son, a Dundee bakery, and blew up the safe. They made an incredible racket, and, when discovered by some passing officers minutes later, were sitting on their arses covered in flour, but with no dough on the horizon, ‘only some books’, according to the ...”

“... T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 ...”

“... PWAs (his equivalent of the red ribbon), with Bosnian refugees, Sudanese famine victims or Jodie Kidd. My reading of Stipe’s prematurely geriatric persona is less cynical. During its heyday in the Eighties, the group was – like most of the industry – heavily into drugs. They have fought their coke-wars, and are now survivors. In the late ...”