“... also strikingly different. Beveridge’s Report was formally commissioned by a Labour minister, Arthur Greenwood, and formally presented to another, William Jowitt. The Labour Party, both in Parliament and in the country, was its strongest proponent. And the Labour ministers of Churchill’s coalition had no doubt that the war, as Attlee put it, was to be ...”

“... to camp gestures. It would be a remarkable compositional skill that could add the necessary little pauses, the twist of irony to the choral texture. Cannily aware that his text might be engorged by the music, Muldoon has fitted it with anti-compositional devices, his own ‘write protect’ labels. If anything consumes anything here, it will be words ...”

“... thrall to the rhetoric of legitimacy, tend to impute to prospective voters the motivations of an Arthur Daley. The rhetoric of democratic politics wavers between moral aspiration and egoism, its talk of profit punctuated now and then by homilies about the family, ‘values’, Jesus and the rest. A conspicuous merit of Habermas’s account is its readiness ...”

“... is the assault of the old on the young, the system on the individual, the powers that be on the little people. Trumbo relies on sledgehammer irony: ‘I used to be a consumer,’ Joe explains at one point, ‘I’ve consumed more shrapnel and gunpowder than any living man.’ He prefers grandiose gestures and Biblical incantations to psychological or ...”

“... low-productivity pits was a crucial problem.’ The social consequences of pit closures seem of little concern to him. Thus his chapter on ‘The Gormley Era’ opens with the declaration that in the late 1960s ‘the industry was now in what I see as the years of consolidation.’ Yet this was a decade when the NCB closed 400 of its 700 collieries, cutting ...”

“... the sense in which that description applies, for instance, to John Stuart Mill (or even perhaps to Arthur Balfour). Brougham’s intellect could serve him superbly in political life, especially perhaps in the mastery of complex subjects displayed in some of his astonishing speeches. Yet the great 1828 speech on law reform, whether or not Brougham was ...”

“... translation of Eileen O’Connell’s famous 18th-century Gaelic poem, ‘The Lament for Arthur O’Leary’. In a bizarre critical judgment which might be seen as a form of transcendental literary Unionism, the professor asserts that ‘The Lament’ is ‘the greatest poem written in these islands in the whole 18th century’. I find this sweeping ...”

“... a problem: you cannot desecrate deconsecrated ground, and a secularised religion should leave little scope for a sacrilegious aesthetic, so how did aesthetic modernism manage to feed what Habermas termed an addiction to the ‘horror which accompanies the act of profaning’? The explanation offered by Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of ...”

“... under fifty years) could not be relied on much for a definition of humanity, since he has had so little time to meet any of the species. Robert Heinlein’s totally self-indulgent The cat who walks through walls (to be acquitted of malignant sexism only on the ground that it is also so innocently pubescent) has made its author two million dollars so far. The ...”

“... later, Cranmer rammed through both houses of Convocation the declaration that Henry’s brother Arthur had ‘carnally known’ Catherine of Aragon and so Henry’s first marriage was unlawful and he was free to marry Anne Boleyn (which he had already done in secret). Within a week, the busy new archbishop had also rammed the Restraint of Appeals Bill ...”

“... But his social climbing can be exaggerated. Tyndall’s London life changed remarkably little over time. Until he was in his sixties he lived in the apartments of the Royal Institution and he had few possessions. He never sought or received honours from the state, and resigned as a government adviser on lighthouses in protest at the Board of ...”

“... broader public. Many of them were historians, including Daniel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Invocations of history punctuated debates over the Cold War, civil rights and Vietnam. But none of these ‘public intellectuals’ reached a larger audience or had a greater social and political impact than C. Vann Woodward, whose books ...”

“... he could insist on his understanding of constitutional norms, and was encouraged by his secretary Arthur Bigge to think of himself as a neutral facilitator of consensus. He brokered conferences on the future of Ireland in 1914 and 1921, though with mixed results. In 1931 his support helped Ramsay MacDonald hold on to office and form the National ...”

“... Mother, Earth Mother or Mother Goddess. Distinguished scholars pioneered the idea, including Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos, and the Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison, who proposed a prehistoric and peaceful woman-centred civilisation in Greece. The discovery of Palaeolithic ‘Venus figurines’, statuettes with exaggerated breasts and ...”

“... absurd animals as men is the mixed one such as ours, which goes on a sort of Jogg Trott with little éclat, with many abuses, as many faults, with a considerable share of tranquillity, and no horrors.’ Bew makes no attempt to rebut the contemporary charge of the Ulster radical William Steel Dickson that Castlereagh was ‘the unblushing betrayer of his ...”