“... should be bad: he despised the very notion of the ‘long term’. Nobody tries to make a case for James Callaghan, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the grandfather ...”

“... O’Hara, Gravity’s Rainbow, and End as a Man, Young Torless, Cavafy and others bizarrer, Lord Weary, Das Schloss, Lady Windermere’s Fan ... The nymphomaniac pensioners in ‘The Sexy Old Ladies of Havergo Hall’ are less discriminating in their pursuit of pleasure: If it breathes, and wears trousers, they move in ...”

“... physical assets and fewer human assets as well. They thus have to insure more against the future. James Duesenberry has proposed that spending on luxuries competes with saving, and will increase in direct proportion to the desire to maintain or improve one’s standing. On this view, American blacks save more because at any given level of income they have ...”

“... at the price of an incomes policy that eventually drove the low-paid into revolt. The last days of James Callaghan, with grave-diggers on strike and NUPE pulling the plug on hospital patients, were piteous and shameful and the ‘winter of discontent’ ensured the victory of Mrs Thatcher. Though Labour were out, the future was still uncertain. Few realised in ...”

“... Of the BBC we hear of ‘its growing reputation for anti-British views’, while we learn that James Reston and Ben Bradlee (of the Washington Post) art ‘left-wing trendies’. Georgetown University, the haunt of so many Reaganite super-hawks (including Jeanne Kirkpatrick), is rubbished as having ‘moved sharply to the Left’. This sort of thing is ...”

“... back of the Labour Government had been broken. Harold Wilson resigned, and begged his successor, James Callaghan, to carry out a full-scale investigation into what he felt had been the subversion of his office by the security services. Callaghan refused. Although Wilson continued with his allegations, the security services felt reprieved. Wright’s ...”

“... right, and specialists in erotica. Ian McIntyre, a long-serving BBC producer and the biographer of Lord Reith, has no obvious prejudices but risks seeming too distanced from his subject. Unfortunately even this is a position well represented in the long history of Burns commentary. The standard biographer addresses a middle-class audience with a message ...”

“... formation, mass equine graves and summary executions, authors riding horses, and authors like Lord Berners painting horses (the horse is standing obediently inside his Oxfordshire manor). He discusses Stubbs’s 1762 portrait of the racehorse Whistlejacket, with its proto-modern background of empty brownish-grey (save for the cast shadows). This ...”

“... long reign and hankered for a change. When that change materialised, however, in the person of James I, they became increasingly unsure that they liked it. The story Dobson and Watson have to tell really begins with that little group of plays by Heywood and Dekker which in the early Jacobean years brought several ‘squeaking’ Elizabeths onto the public ...”

“... womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and James Macpherson weighed in from North of the border. The Irish were never just gorillas with gelignite. Those Irish historians who play down the anti-Irishness of the British for their own political ends are right to that extent. It would be surprising if people ...”

“... granddaughter of a sister of Henry VIII. In other words, she had the sort of claim that brought James VI to the throne of England in 1603 (he was a great-grandson of a sister of Henry VIII). By contrast, both Mary and Elizabeth had been officially declared bastards by their father; that had not changed by 1553. So it was perfectly plausible for Protestants ...”

“... efforts of Samuel Joseph, who capped a successful business career with a less happy term as Lord Mayor of London during the Second World War. For Keith Joseph, born in 1918 and himself a product of Harrow and Oxford, Bovis was not only an inspiring model of entrepreneurship: it was a milch cow allowing him to function as a political grandee. He hung on ...”

“... and those under him were closely scrutinised for any tremulousness of the upper lip. James Murray, an eminent Scottish biologist who accompanied Fawcett’s 1911 expedition along the upper Heath River, was tested particularly harshly, being an interloper from the more showily dramatic – and better-funded – world of polar ...”

“... to ransom or murdered, usually by decapitation. Journalists who took the risk paid a heavy price: James Foley was kidnapped in November 2012 and executed by Islamic State in August 2014. Steven Sotloff was kidnapped in Aleppo in August 2013 and beheaded soon after Foley. But there is tremendous public demand to know what is happening in such places, and news ...”

“... was sentenced to seven years, Ellis to six years and Keeling to two years. The recorder of London, James Miskin, berated Ridgewell and Ellis: ‘Without any excuse or explanation, you helped others ship out of this depot Lord knows how much stolen property, and I shall never know where it went or who got what from the ...”