“... insurance industry. There may be domestic policy reasons for doing it, but Brussels should not be held responsible. As part of the Lisbon Treaty negotiations the UK got an opt-out from most of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. The charter reproduces the rights included in the European Convention on Human Rights, which isn’t an EU treaty, but was ...”

“... was the idol of the hour and the prophet and theorist of a new British Empire. The vision he held out was utopian. The ramshackle Empire was to be reorganised into a world-state of self-governing nations, freely co-operating and acting as one in defence, trade, foreign policy and ideals of citizenship. As Seeley had taught, the British would cease to ...”

“... ad hoc inquiries into a defined issue, were not in fashion at the time. The last one had been held fourteen years earlier. But the Conservative home secretary, Kenneth Baker, announced on the day of the Birmingham Six’s release that a Royal Commission would look into the criminal justice system.Led by W.G. Runciman, a sociologist and hereditary ...”

“... beat us with, and pursues the possibility that their weaknesses might be the obverse of our own. David Nettler, the language expert who falls into Oitarian thought patterns, gives a long account of what it is like to enter that alien ‘mindscape’: Somehow the senses – the body – seemed to grow dim, so that it was an inert mechanism, like a corpse ...”

“... it won in 1997 in what most assumed were freak victories. Of Labour’s 30 most marginal seats it held 23 with increased majorities. The Tories won only four Labour marginals with decisive swings, and two of those, Romford and Upminster, are idiosyncratic. Those conspicuous beneficiaries of Thatcherism, Reading and Swindon, swung further to Labour – in ...”

“... that he sometimes seemed to be cheering on the defeat of the British army in South Africa. He held an anti-war meeting in Birmingham Town Hall, the heartland of Chamberlain’s political fief, and insisted that it go ahead when everyone from the chief constable down pleaded with him to cancel it. The result was the virtual sack of the town hall by a Union ...”

“... Craig has been signed up for the American remake of the first film, which will be directed by David Fincher. The quest to find Lisbeth Salander took on Scarlett O’Hara proportions; the role has been filled with attendant fanfare by Rooney Mara, who was introduced to the world in Fincher’s last movie, The Social Network. (It will be interesting to see ...”

“... has advocated ‘home rule all round’ in a new federal union. A similar call has come from David Melding, the Conservative deputy presiding officer of the Welsh Assembly, in The Reformed Union: The UK as a Federation, published last year; while Conservatives at Westminster, including Kenneth Baker, Malcolm Rifkind and members of the so-called Democracy ...”

“... is a daunting enterprise. For one thing, Dr Johnson apart, no English man of letters has ever held a higher opinion of the dignity of biography as a literary form, or inferentially expected more from its practitioners. Carlyle’s most famous dictum, ‘History is the essence of innumerable biographies,’ may have been meant only metaphorically, but ...”

“... eight million. It operated two administrative capital cities: Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. It held Fallujah and for a time Ramadi, sixty miles from Baghdad, as well as innumerable small towns and villages, much desert and a good deal of irrigated countryside. The horrors of IS rule are well known: the killings of Shia; the choice offered to the Christians ...”

“... replaced the wisdom of the ancestors. ‘Till about the yeare 1649,’ Aubrey wrote, it was ‘held a strange presumption for a man to attempt an innovation in learning; and not to be good manners to be more knowing than his neighbours and forefathers.’ As the Christian narrative of the Fall gave way to a sense of history as progress and steady ...”

“... for retirement in an orderly way’. The PEP in question was General Augusto Pinochet, who held between $6 and $8 million in offshore accounts established by Riggs, and is now being investigated for fraud and embezzlement. Jersey became an offshore finance centre as a result of pressure from local law firms, some with strong political connections, and ...”

“... sacrifice his life to the national cause, and that was the measure of his worth. Norwid, however, held that it was a violation of natural rights to relate the meaning of human life to armed struggle and to nothing else. He mocked the ‘forlorn hope’ gestures, the over-dramatised martyrology. In all this he saw an anti-intellectualism, a contempt for ...”

“... absurdities, its partings and comings together, its superstructure of sexual theory, is very well held, and although we’re asked to see the story rather more from the wife’s point of view than the husband’s, Maddox won’t give her the benefit of outraged or sentimental feminism; she even dares to speak of ‘Frieda’s tedious insistence that she was ...”

“... ruthless towards former lovers. This cannot be quite right: people as cold and hard as Sharp is held to have been do not destroy themselves in alcoholic depression and self-loathing. That kind of behaviour is surely evidence more of emotional turmoil. The world of Edwardian leftish journalism inhabited by Sharp was dominated by two opposed currents. A ...”