“... But the remark was not as self-deprecating as it looks. It was among other things an allusion to John Stuart Mill, who had opened his own very celebrated Autobiography with a similar disclaimer: he had nothing to offer, he said, apart from an account of the origin and growth of his philosophical convictions, and ‘the reader whom these things do not ...”

“... connections that can entail. He has Westminster experience as a parliamentary researcher, but to John McDonnell; his parents were Militant activists and his politics are rooted in a Trotskyist version of Labourism, yet he has managed to force a neoliberal Labour establishment to take him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ...”

“... our obligations to suit our inclinations, rather in the way that, in Sense and Sensibility, John Dashwood and his wife Fanny gradually persuade themselves that the large sum of money John had promised to support his stepmother and half-sisters really ought, in the best interests of everyone involved, to be reduced to ...”

“... History. The chapter on Southern Africa in the 19th century by Christopher Saunders and Iain Smith benignly suggests that ‘British troops repeatedly intervened to play a crucial role in supporting settlers who were unable on their own to displace African farmers.’ No attempt is made to describe what ‘intervention’ or ‘displacement’ might have ...”

“... and did not make much fuss when southerners referred to the whole island as ‘England’. Sir John Seeley wrote his prophecy of a global imperial destiny in 1883 under the title The Expansion of England. For generations, the fact of England’s numerical predominance in the UK was veiled by the image of the island English as the heroic founding ...”

“... didn’t even need democracy: fellow-feeling would have been enough. My great-great-grandfather John Low, arguing against Lord Dalhousie’s proposal to annex Nagpur in 1854, recalled from his experience all over India cases of our having suffered heavy losses in revenue, and very extensive losses in human lives, owing to the want of wealth among our native ...”

“... they all ate so much, and their conduct was such,/That it killed that Old Man of the East’). John St Loe Strachey was eight when he met Lear, and later recalled that ‘he knew a great deal about children, and they knew that he knew it and he knew that they knew that he knew it and so a complete and (as he might have said) abject harmony was ...”

“... on (it hardly tackles) the now permitted potash mine in the North York Moors National Park, with John Craven posing against the idyllic landscape and asking some toothless questions. The usual justifications are put forward – local employment (no one says how much or how guaranteed), local prosperity – though with no questions as to who the shareholders ...”

“... Gertrude Jekyll lived to see the first waves of the tide of gentility that swept over Surrey until John Betjeman could not look at one of Miss Jekyll’s beloved rhododendrons without thinking of a stockbroker. Less intellectual, in many ways less effective than Morris, she was, nevertheless, in one sense nearer the heart of the issue. In her work as a garden ...”

“... He parcelled out his Beagle specimens to white-collar naturalists: to zoological craftsmen like John Gould (who reciprocated by christening a new rhea darwinii after him). Darwin modelled his Zoology on Humboldt’s Zoologie, acting as taskmaster and paymaster chivvying a Gradgrind work-force. Not that he was incapable of such work himself. Although in ...”

“... of self-love put forward by Condillac and Helvétius and naturalised into England by Adam Smith and Bentham. Hazlitt raged against reaction and tyranny in England, but the intellectual roots of what he raged against were French, not English. Even the group which welcomed 1789 most warmly, the politically active ministers of the Dissenting ...”

“... Scanlon and Thomas Pogge from the Kantian, Gerald Cohen, Brian Barry, the economists Amartya Sen, John Roemer and Partha Dasgupta, all get a nod in a footnote at most, and we hear nothing informative about how their arguments would be addressed. Major historical contributors such as Kant, Bentham and Adam Smith don’t even ...”

“... meals from Tesco and Marks & Spencer’. Most wonderfully, we also have Delia Smith, ‘who explains much of what the knowledge economy is about’. Leadbeater is too busy ‘to learn at first hand what makes her chicken in sherry wine vinegar quite so tasty. Instead, I can read her recipes.’ They prove that ‘globalisation is good for ...”

“... was inexplicable it did not exist, and drew on experience and intuition. Her author, one Horace Smith, had based his novel partly on his own encounters with mesmerism, and probably also on the famous case of the writer Harriet Martineau. Even his modest invalid knew enough to know that she was living in an age of prescientific ferment. One of Alison ...”

“... is that of Walter Bagehot, the Victorian journalist and banker, still believed in by Mr St John-Stevas. She even refers in more than one place to ‘St Bagehot’, which I fear reflects the uncritical adoration this smart performer received in academic quarters in the Packenhams’ youth. The essence of Bagehot’s view is that the Queen is merely an ...”