“... devolution provoked demands for a legislature. Agitation within the Liberal Party, headed by the Young Scots Society, brought the prospect of a parliament in view in 1913, as part of a home-rule-all-round settlement. This vanished with the Liberals, to reappear with the Independent Labour Party. Even Ramsay MacDonald, in his National Government ...”

“... Which is getting closer, by the way. Shaking the memory of some of our experiences together as young writers at the University of East Anglia and in London might get you in the mood for what’s to come, not the stuff about the late-night tattoo sessions and the three-week hunt for Mr Hashish, the Afghan border guard who stole your US Army fatigue jacket ...”

“... Miss Gallagher, a prissy governess whom neither can stand, but who suffers unrequited passion for young Cathy. The children puzzle over the sudden and mystifying disappearance of their parents, a topic which must not be spoken of in public. There are clues picked up from village gossip, from the servants, from the mean-spirited and jealous Miss ...”

“... a mortal wound. Discussion of the end of the Cold War brought Halliday into collision with Edward Thompson, and their three-part dispute is reprinted here. Thompson reproached Halliday for describing the final arms-reduction process without mention of the Peace Movement as an influence on both superpowers, and went on to accuse him of a more general ...”

“... Maude alongside consensual modernisers sceptical of market-based solutions like Iain Macleod and Edward Heath. The diversity has continued: later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various ...”

“... that there was anything very equitable about his dealings with them. As the Jacobean diplomat Sir Edward Hoby observed, it was ‘lawful for a Christian to take away anything from infidels’. Pynchon was a restless man and six years after his arrival in America he headed a group of settlers who moved from Massachusetts Bay to a new site. Formerly the home ...”

“... launched in 1997): James Cook’s journal of the Endeavour, written in his own hand; and the Edward Koiki Mabo Papers, the record of Eddie Mabo’s landmark case before the High Court, which gave legal recognition to the fact that indigenous land ownership existed before European settlement and was not, in some cases, extinguished by the Crown. The ...”

“... thinker of 17th-century Ireland, Robert Boyle, to such 18th-century divines as William King, Edward Synge, Philip Skelton, Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift. Sterne, Joyce and Beckett classify the world compulsively, but only to make a mockery of the whole futile business. Walter Shandy, the obsessive rationalist of Sterne’s great novel, is clearly ...”

“... previous novel, Old Filth: both are about the same people, and some of the same stories recur. Edward Feathers, Old Filth, is very clean, and for much of the two novels isn’t old; it’s a Bar joke, an acronym, ‘failed in London try Hong Kong’. He begins his career as a QC specialising in construction law, then becomes a judge, spending most of his ...”

“... one stand up for the British national anthem? Should the theatre close to mourn the death of Edward VII? Yes, Gregory thought: after all, she said, her husband had been a personal friend of the King. Could one preserve the manners of one’s class and still work for Home Rule? Perhaps it was not really possible to do both without arousing suspicions of ...”

“... the scientists can help by making aesthetics a matter of knowledge rather than opinion. Well, if Edward Wilson’s Consilience is anything to go by, they can’t, and the same must be said of Ramachandran and Hirstein, who attempted, by experiments on rats, to divine the deep structure or universal rule underlying all aesthetic experience. Carey emphasises ...”

“... affluent commuters. The lecture includes a tribute to the Metropolitan’s great Victorian, Sir Edward Watkin, who dreamed of the company’s tracks forming part of a single line under a single management running from Manchester through London to Dover and then under the Channel to the Continent. It was Watkin’s men who began excavating a tunnel near ...”

“... mujaddara, or Esau’s pottage.’ In 1933, Hourani went up to Oxford, to read PPE: ‘a very thin young man with luminous green eyes and a diaphanous complexion’, according to his friend Charles Issawi. After graduating, he worked for Chatham House and the Foreign Office, before becoming a fellow of Magdalen and subsequently director of the Middle East ...”

“... and the notorious Professor Gebhardt carried out experimental transplants of bone and muscle on young women, leaving them badly injured. Babies who were born in the camp soon starved to death, their mothers too undernourished to feed them. By the end of the war, more than 25,000 women had died in Ravensbrück of starvation or illness, or had been ...”

“... of life. The message from the social margins was unequivocal. Those who died very poor died very young. In 1837 it was calculated that the average age at death of labourers was 38 in Rutland and 15 in Liverpool. The rich got richer as they got older because direct taxation was low (income tax peaked at 10 per cent during the war with France, and was ...”