“... which, because it was valid in Rome, tied Maria to him but which, because it was invalid in Britain, did not tie him to her. Although its invalidity (thanks to the 1772 Act) did not bring the Act of Settlement into operation, his marriage would have caused a major political crisis had it become fully known. Yet Smith is surely right to blame ...”

“... Their piece finishes with a laundry-list of personality traits that obtained in both Celtic Britain and the Old South and that help explain why the South is different from the North. The American South and Celtic Britain ‘were leisure-oriented societies that fostered idleness and gaiety, where people favoured the ...”

“... and Feyerabend. The article blamed Mrs Thatcher’s decision to abolish fundamental science in Britain – and public acquiescence in this outrage – on the vicious philosophy of science propagated by these four. Popper preached refutation, Kuhn urged the necessity of scientific revolutions, Lakatos taught that all science wallows in a sea of ...”

“... Ian Gilmour is one of the most leftwing figures in British politics: a feat he has achieved by not moving. He remains upright amid the ruins of a Keynesian political economy while the two major parties quarrel over possession of the new orthodoxy. He has also written one of the best things on Thatcherism: Dancing with Dogma (1992), a book which will demonstrate to a later generation that not all Conservative politicians took leave of their senses in the Eighties ...”

“... the various actors, and the way these were transformed by the shifting tides of the war itself, Ian Kershaw gives a far stronger sense of the open-endedness of things. Very little about the war was inevitable. Many of the biggest decisions were, by most counts, irrational, even crazy: Britain’s to fight on against ...”

“... At the tail-end of 2000, Ian Sansom decided to move from London to a small town in County Down. He had half expected friends to dismiss his plan as a backwoods adventure, and was surprised when they said they felt the lure of the place. Sansom tells the story of moving house, and makes sense of his friends’ enthusiasm, in a typically buoyant essay, ‘Where Do We Live?’* In the English imagination, he argues, Ireland ‘remains a place of refuge and fantasy ...”

“... Alexei Sayle into Les Dawson. Still, for the moment, they must surely be the funniest live act in Britain: they have spleen to spare and they are obviously having a good time. It would take a really silly fucker to predict what they’ll do ...”

“... be governed by a toff. After all, to poke fun at Major’s dinginess was to poke fun at half of Britain. At the same time, though, everybody knows that non-toffs don’t get to lead the Tory Party simply by plodding up the ladder. Thatcher was different: she was touched by the feather of unreason. Was Major perhaps similarly touched? He seemed not to ...”

“... of optical illusion, as fantastic and artificial in its way as Ranelagh. ‘Certain gardens,’ Ian Hamilton Finlay has said, ‘are described as retreats when they are really attacks,’ and Miss Jekyll’s were attacks on the old Morrisian demons of ugliness and standardisation, but also on a world where country estates were getting smaller. Her ...”

“... Ian Gilmour could scarcely have timed the publication of this book better. The last few weeks really have been a Marxist ‘conjuncture’: a heightened moment when social realities can no longer be contained by dominant ideologies; or, in the idiom of an un-Marxist age, the moment when the sky is darkened by chickens returning to roost ...”

“... boundaries, Labour shut its party office in town. Deirdre thinks that the local Labour MP, Ian Lavery, is too wary of encountering hostile locals. She feels isolated. ‘Every Sunday night, when we go to town and have a game of bingo in the club, and people are always having a go, you know, here’s the Labour Party coming. You know, this ...”

“... the girlfriend of Edward Mayhew, a nice girl in her early twenties from a nice background in Ian McEwan’s new novel, On Chesil Beach, when ‘one Saturday afternoon in late March, with the rain falling heavily outside the windows . . . she let her hand rest briefly on, or near, his penis.’ What she experienced was ‘a living thing, quite separate ...”

“... of Sir Derek Ezra, supreme servant and subtle bureaucrat of consensus, and that of Sir Ian MacGregor, vieux terrible of confrontation. ‘There is either too much or too little.’ Not since 1913, in fact, have the figures seemed roughly right. Coal had been ancillary, rather than essential, to Britain’s early ...”

“... By the time of the Labour Party Conference I’d had time to read the 1983 Election study, How Britain votes which explodes the notion that class-voting is on the wane. This is a good example of my appearance-reality theorem. The idea that home ownership, consumerism, holidays abroad, were undermining class solidarity had in recent years become central to ...”

“... On its jacket we read that Sinclair’s ‘involvement with his childhood and adolescence in Britain has led to his writing of War like a Wasp’, and although he was but ten years old in 1945, his narrator’s manner is indeed bright with insiderism as he treks around Fitzrovia with Tambimuttu, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Dylan Thomas and the gang. ‘Senses ...”