“... fine to avoid being ‘well whipped’. Marshfield was more fortunate than the quarrelsome midwife Margaret Jones, who had been hanged for witchcraft on Boston Common in June 1648, or the servant Mary Johnson, pregnant with an illegitimate child, who was condemned six months later, having confessed to ‘familiarity with the devil’. In the years following ...”

“... George was a travelling salesman selling hats along the south coast for the firm of Ayres & Smith. He had served in the First World War, and the outbreak of the Second all but ruined him when Ayres & Smith turned their production over to military headgear. He persisted nevertheless, setting off day after day, decade ...”

“... repository of the Reithian BBC’s nationalised moralism and authority. The following week, Joan Smith pursued a similarly dangerous line in the Independent on Sunday: ‘In recent days ... those of us who are not willing to pretend to emotions we don’t feel have been getting an ominous message – that we ought to keep quiet. It’s a message which is not ...”

“... book is not the first to tell the story of his life: an unfinished memoir by his younger sister, Margaret Paul, was published in 2012, but it was missing a crucial chapter – about Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge in 1929 – and wasn’t especially good on the philosophy. Misak, a philosopher at the University of Toronto, draws on extensive archival ...”

“... dispensing with such footling restrictions, left-of-centre figures such as Cook, John Prescott, Margaret Beckett and Chris Smith have been allowed to surround themselves with like-minded ministers. The man who has replaced the Blairite factotum Stephen Byers, for example, in charge of minimum wage and trade-union ...”

“... Temple Grandin’s 1986 memoir, Emergence: Labelled Autistic, he thought Grandin’s co-author, Margaret Scariano, must have written it. ‘The autistic mind, it was supposed at that time, was incapable of self-understanding and understanding others and therefore of authentic introspection and retrospection,’ Sacks wrote. ‘How could an autistic person ...”

“... The accused had to be coerced into submission or die. The most famous case in England was that of Margaret Clitherow, who in 1586 was charged with harbouring Catholic priests in her home. It took her 15 minutes to die, crushed under a load of nearly 800 lbs. In 1721, a judge at the Old Bailey sentenced two supposed highwaymen, Thomas Cross and William ...”

“... free-market remedies; and how the Centre for Policy Studies, egged on by accomplices like the Adam Smith Institute, ultimately succeeded in hi-jacking the Conservative Party. It is a case-study in the way that ideas are dangerous, for good or evil. Hayek was Austrian by birth but had held a chair at the London School of Economics since 1931 and had become ...”

“... this go back a long way: David Green starts with a brief conducted tour of Locke, Hume and Adam Smith. Of more immediate interest are the writings of Hayek, Milton Friedman, and the Virginia public choice school, and the work of a whole raft of contemporary research institutes and think tanks – the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Social Affairs ...”

“... Mrs Bennet. Once again, other authors fail to match Austen’s remarkable diversity. Forster’s Margaret Schlegel ‘develops’ considerably more than other figures in her world, but less than 14 characters of Austen’s. Mostly, however, it is by comparing Austen characters with one another, often with another figure in the same novel, that Burrows ...”

“... himself into running something like a campaign when competing for the leadership with Iain Duncan Smith and been ready to appear more tractable on Europe; if David Davis had moved decisively in the immediate aftermath of Michael Howard’s resignation or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had ...”

“... in point of its grand setting. And then there was a sort of sensation at the door and in came Margaret Thatcher. Rab’s shell crackled and contracted a little, as he tried to look flattered by the attention of his new leader: she whose whole purpose it was to cram Butskellism as harshly as possible into the WPB of history.And I? Reader, I was ...”

“... in 1988, he was a spent force. Voted off the NEC in 1993, he could only watch as first John Smith and then Blair and Gordon Brown modernised the Party. That they did so from Millbank Tower, built on the site of the house in which Benn was born, added pathos to the triumph of New Labour over old. The fate of the Bennite Left under New Labour underlines ...”

“... the programme, as did Herbert Hoover in 1928 (when he was running against the notorious drinker Al Smith of New York). Hoover called the cause ‘a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose’, and won by a landslide. Prohibition collapsed only when the Great Depression destroyed every aspect of the Hoover programme. But ...”

“... James Thurber’s best-known cartoon has an impassive little man introducing his spouse to a dazed friend with ‘That’s My First Wife Up There, and This Is the Present Mrs Harris.’ The first Mrs Harris seems to be crouched on all fours on the top of a very high (glazed) bookcase, just behind the second Mrs Harris. This image has found an appreciative audience even among those not particularly interested in American humour of the 1930s ...”