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“... Labour landslide year, that the first Nuffield election study appeared, with the hand of a young David Butler already apparent. It was, sadly, a jejune and disappointing volume which explains very little of the last great realigning election of modern times. Since then Butler has taken an increasingly dominant role in the enterprise and the books have ...”

“... has claimed her for posterity. When a memorial to her was finally put up in 1909, it was to ‘Dr Johnson’s Mrs Thrale’. In one of his last missives to his ‘dear mistress’, shortly before her marriage to Piozzi caused him to burn all her letters, Johnson credited Hester with soothing ‘twenty years of a life ...”

“... In March 1776, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather ...”

“... with decanters and after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking ...”

“... R.W. Johnson​ is a long-standing contributor to the LRB. His first appearance was on the letters page in 1981, where he took ‘mild issue’ with a review of his most celebrated book, The Long March of the French Left. In 1984 he wrote a memorable piece about national intelligence agencies, and the following year, a homage to Pierre Mendès France, one of the best pieces the paper has published on postwar politics in France ...”

“... continue to follow some single-market rules. This implicitly means putting in place what Boris Johnson had categorically ruled out: border checks. ‘We can do a deal without checks on the Irish border,’ he declared a year ago. The government has since acknowledged that there will be ‘minimal’ checks. Northern Ireland aside, there is no agreement on ...”

“... Precaution​ and continence, as we know, are not qualities that characterise Boris Johnson in any sphere of his life. On 3 February, as a prelude to the Brexit trade talks, he gave a speech in the Painted Hall at Greenwich. It was a hymn to the glories of free trade and the spirit of Adam Smith, almost as baroque as James Thornhill’s enormous ceiling with its allegories of Time Exposing Truth and other desirable outcomes ...”

“... will have carried a special charge for Barlow. ‘On yer bike!’ Hovis preceded Boris (Mayor Johnson) as sponsor of the cult of cycling, but the whole business, so attractive to ad men and lavishly rewarded imagineers, never moved far from Scott’s syrupy terrain. (Scott was a cycle obsessive. His first short film, made in 1965 in his student days at ...”

“... and again in June, pressed the Conservative prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home, to advise President Johnson against extending the war into the North. Following his election victory in October that year, Wilson was advised by the Foreign Office that, with regard to Vietnam, ‘ministers should agree to support the United States in this limited and controlled ...”

“... upward blip in 1987 or 1988 – the curve of Labour support has gone downwards ever since. R.W. Johnson’s often perverse, sometimes brilliant and always provocative volume of essays provides a splendid point of departure for exploring the connections between these two themes. The best one is a discursive enquiry into the cultural roots of British ...”

“... in the shape of That Was the Week That Was, which first aired on 24 November 1962, presented by David Frost. With the cancelling of that show little more than a year later, ostensibly on the grounds that it interfered with the BBC’s duty of impartiality in the run-up to the 1964 election, the heyday of anti-establishment comedy was already over. Yet its ...”

“... is it in Sweden, Germany, Italy? In Sweden it’s 1949, as far as the publication date of Eyvind Johnson’s remarkable novel is concerned, but then things get a little complicated, because the novel is set in 17th-century France, and concerns the devils of Loudun – Aldous Huxley published his account of this celebrated case in 1952. In fact, we have to ...”

“... immediately, despite Chamberlain’s frantic attempts to hang on, the age of Churchill began. David Faber, an Old Etonian and, like Leo and Julian Amery, a former Tory MP, has had the good idea of writing the story of the father and his two sons. Julian was appointed minister of aviation by his father-in-law, Macmillan, and could claim to be the man ...”

“... failed to protect his father in 1914; sometimes less so, as when he discharged part of his debt to David Lloyd George by appointing his son Gwilym to a post at the Ministry of Food (although the Minister, Lord Woolton, had already approached someone else). And as he firmly maintained that cross-Channel operations should be fitted into the framework of the ...”

“... Towards the end, I asked the table: ‘If it all goes wrong, who will you hate the most: Gove, Johnson, or Farage?’ Gove was beneath numerical notice; Johnson got seven votes; I put my own marker against Farage. In the context of Brexit, Johnson seemed to me just a ...”