“... says admiringly. Hundreds if not thousands of books came back across the Channel, of which (says David Dumville) maybe eleven can be identified. One of the books imported was an enormous Old Latin Bible from Cassiodorus’s Vivarium. It has not survived, but served as a format-model for the great Codex Amiatinus written at the twin foundations of ...”

“... the Protestant Irish, landowners, protectionists, the City, much of the Church of England and King George V. No Labour Government, not even Attlee’s, faced such a coalition. There was, of course, an unintended element to this; but it was the inevitable outcome of a strategy which originated with Gladstone and was continued by his successors: that you ...”

“... in her diaries. 1 July 1939: ‘Jojo, thin, only 120 lbs, but very good. I read a chapter of David Copperfield a day to him, explaining points of conduct, geography, history, character, ethics, etc, and it seems a means of awakening him to realities.’ 7 February 1940: Jojo is ‘better than I ever knew him – in the thrill to his mind his walk changed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who gained international notoriety, mostly through celebrated trials: Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Ericka Huggins, Elaine Brown. But rather than focusing on the sensationalist and salacious aspects of the party’s history – the confrontations, violence, criminality – Bloom and Martin choose to recount ...”

“... read what he writes and not think of similarities between then and now. His book is in contrast to David Kynaston’s four-volume history of the City of London, which takes up the idea of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ and portrays the Victorian era as a relatively sane and sober interlude.* Kynaston explains the hands-off policy in terms of esprit de corps. The ...”

“... because – as is becoming customary (see the books on Britain’s later colonial wars by Saul David) – neither author romanticises his subject to any great degree. Both are good on the daily lives of 18th and early 19th-century soldiers, and on the boring periods between battles. They mention (and Latimer has quite a bit about) the many women ...”

“... the talent for comedy revealed in her letters. Staying in Rye with Alec Vidler, former dean of King’s College, Cambridge, who was helping her with research for The Knox Brothers, she described the house party to her daughter: a trendy cleric, his dull wife, a long-skirted daughter, going up to read English at Hertford, who evidently hadn’t wanted to ...”

“... chiefs of staff took very different approaches to the role of counsellor. Timothy, the philosopher-king of blue-collar Conservatism, hoped to reposition the Tories as a statist national party working in the interests of all classes, not just the fortunate haves. Hill was more intuitive and less wordy. But on one thing they concurred: the role of favourite ...”

“... cartoonist Nick Drnaso, arrives midway through a story – one of six – called ‘The Lil’ King’. A boy sits outside a locked motel room as rhythmic groans emanate from the other side of the door: his parents have stolen a moment alone, thinking the kids are at the pool. It is the last family road trip before his older sister goes away to ...”

“... is deployed in a more realist setting, and more relentlessly. Reading it, I was reminded of David Shields’s remark that with most conventional novels, ‘you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written.’ Here the key term is, once again, ‘the future’, a quantity that the ...”

“... logistics, finance, real estate, technology, entertainment and pharmaceuticals. Bezos is the king of logistics and technology; the queen of logistics, the Walmart heiress Ann Walton, owns the largest US-built motor yacht since the 1930s, Aquila. Yacht-owners on the East Coast include hedge fund managers and real estate tycoons and berth their boats in ...”

“... Show, Married with Children, Fight Club, The Full Monty, Ally McBeal, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, King of the Hill, Titanic. We can usually think of one or two of these at the same time, but the sheer extent of Murdoch’s businesses is so vast that it is hard to hold them in the mind simultaneously. When his wife Anna filed for divorce and was asked the ...”

“... miners at the industry’s peak. Landlordism is the closest thing we have to a national industry. King Charles is a private landlord. John Lewis is a private landlord. The homelessness charity St Mungo’s is a private landlord. So are many MPs and, as Ruby found out, doctors.Landlordism has proliferated in tandem with soaring land and property values. A ...”

“... decades after 1945. The first is the dream of the social-democratic equivalent of the philosopher-king. This expresses the hope that even in contemporary mass democracies a figure will emerge who can work the political machine and at the same time embody intellect, sensibility and liberal values, someone who can win power and then exercise it in the name of ...”