“... Christian, communitarianism of Tawney and his descendants. The notions that made their mark on the magazine were more individualist, radical-liberal ones. Robin Cook’s personal credo is more obviously New Statesmanly than Blair’s: ‘what attracted me to the Labour Party was not the values of collectivism but the values of individualism, of ...”

“... flowed from the Gramscian revaluations of English/British history undertaken by Nairn and Perry Anderson in the 1960s. One solid and effective consequence of that recognition was Charter 88, a fresh campaign for constitutional reform which took shape in the late 1980s. Ten years before, in The Break-Up of Britain (1977), Nairn had put forward the ...”

“... congresses now rival United Russia in acclamations of its leader, that is not necessarily a black mark in a tradition that respects authoritarianism as a sign of strength. The weaknesses in Erdogan’s public image lie elsewhere. Choleric and umbrageous, he is vulnerable to ridicule in the press, suing journalists by the dozen for unfavourable coverage of ...”

“... situation, Furman would have supported him. Yet the dignity with which he bore his fall was a mark of the same character. In the end, his failure was not personal: the social forces needed to carry through perestroika no longer ...”

“... who detest it. Viewed historically, however, comparisons with Vargas, let alone Perón, miss the mark. The differences between their forms of rule and Lula’s are fundamental. Not that the great practitioners of populism in Brazil and Argentina were all that alike themselves. Vargas’s rhetoric was paternalist and sentimental, Perón’s rousing and ...”

“... of ‘late capitalism’ – a term most people encountered in Jameson, not Mandel – is a mark of immaturity, an outworn college creed. The thing itself may grow old with us, but the term can’t be used by middle-aged grown-ups participating in the real world (that is to say, the surface of the earth, minus college campuses). The same may go for ...”

“... he was bitter that Oxford refused to implement his main proposals. Cambridge was earlier off the mark. In 1961 I got a committee set up to consider what questions should be asked, were Cambridge ever to reform its governance. A year passed. The committee never met. They said they were too burdened with business. So in 1962 I tried again and a prestigious ...”

“... every stripe – from Sakharov to Zhirinovsky, Lebed to Berezovsky – could emerge and make their mark. But once it stabilised, the career paths of its functionaries produced weak characters, Chernenko-like nullities of the lowest moral-intellectual level, as ever tighter control at the top eliminated potential rivals, yielding the crop of Putin’s ...”

“... time in its history. For it to fissure at the moment of withdrawal would be to put a question-mark over what all right-thinking patriots, not least such products of an imperial education as Attlee, must regard with pride as the most remarkable creative achievement of their empire. If Britain had to leave India, India should be as Britain had forged ...”

“... against him. In 2005 it was revealed that Woodward and Bernstein’s source, Deep Throat, was Mark Felt, a Hoover loyalist and associate director of the FBI. Hoover plays a central role in Ken Hughes’s gripping investigation, Chasing Shadows, which takes as its point of departure the only break-in ordered by Nixon on 2658 hours of tape: not at ...”

“... pool, and a grotto with whirlpool baths modelled on the caves at Lascaux. The Mansion Mark II was a gated Neverland and, in its decadence, utterly kitsch. There was no explicitly modern décor. As in Chicago, the LA Mansion served as a backdrop for Playboy shoots, with subscribers offered a peek through the bunny-shaped keyhole. But the ...”

“... for the Fifties Eagle, whose first issue is reproduced in colour. What else? Prettifiers like Anne Anderson and Honor Appleton get in, but not the more distinctive Gladys Peto; Robert Lawson is here but not Lawson Wood; A.E. Bestall (briefly) but not Thomas Henry. In compiling the book – which is, in fact, very nearly comprehensive – the authors have drawn ...”

“... that if he were the paper’s owner he would have ‘stamped on’ the paper’s publication of Mark ‘Thatcher’s part in the Oman deal. The fact that one of Maxwell’s companies has interests in Oman is probably only coincidental, but few would find the remark reassuring. However, it doesn’t seem likely that Rowland was ever serious about selling the ...”

“... its independence and the legal order of the EU,’ Martin Wolf thundered. ‘Future historians may mark this as the decisive turning-point in Europe’s history, towards disintegration.’ They need not have turned a hair. The Bundesverfassungsgericht is a mostly toothless body, as its studiously suspended judgments indicate. Best known for meekly overturning ...”

“... its moment, explains some of its flaws as well as its significance. Polanyi wanted to make his mark on the postwar settlement, to warn of the dangers of divorcing the economy from society. But his book received little acclaim on either side of the Atlantic. His daughter, the Canadian economist Kari Polanyi Levitt, wrote in 1990 that in England, ‘where ...”