“... in the 1964 election campaign about new technology, little thought was given to this problem. When Lord Zuckerman, as the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, produced a report in 1969 suggesting diversion of effort into the civil field, Wilson rejected it: ‘I am afraid there is no political capital in this because nothing we decide will have any effect ...”

“... Monday night till Friday morning. Opium and its effects here receive the jawgrinding judgment of James Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1823, soon after the appearance of Thomas de Quincey’s celebrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Hogg delivers what might be called the Scottish verdict on this awesome substance, a ...”

“... shows how the ‘carnivalesque’ was harnessed to official ideologies under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that the play’s formal involutions reflect, not transcendent truths about illusion and reality, but the ideological ...”

“... subsequently ‘discovered’ and launched as a public performer, she spoke of the time when King James had roamed the country as a gaberlunzie man as if it was just a moment before yesterday. What she sang seemed to her to be fact, or at any rate truth, and her historical sense collapsed chronology. I was moved to remember this by J.F.C. Harrison’s ...”

“... up.The daisy chain continued to get longer: in 1901 Olive Custance – who eventually eloped with Lord Alfred Douglas – had affairs with both Barney and Vivien. A year later Vivien met Baroness Hélène van Zuylen, nicknamed ‘La Brioche’ for the way she curled her hair, and started an affair. Barney became jealous, dubbed van Zuylen a fat Valkyrie, and ...”

“... veterans of public discussion; others, like William Godwin, Coleridge, Helen Maria Williams and James Montgomery, were just setting out on careers that promised extraordinary achievements. They are unusual suspects because they were not organisers and activists, orators and pamphleteers who urged direct action in support of reform, or who set out to incite ...”

“... 1936, a few days after the German invasion of the Rhineland, Nancy Astor threw a party at 4 St James’s Square. As well as being the first woman MP (elected in 1919), Astor was a legendary hostess. To this particular dinner party she invited various League of Nations delegates, the American and Russian ambassadors, an assortment of English friends and ...”

“... generalisations of post-colonial critique. He presents, among other specimens, an unfamiliar James Anthony Froude, whose fulminations about native degeneration in The English in Ireland contrast sharply with his early appreciation of Isaac Butt’s version of Home Rule in the 1870s. (The polarisations after 1886, when the Gladstonian Liberal embrace of ...”

“... Ned, an American whose voice whines like a gnat, manipulates the stupid but beautiful bisexual James in The Sweet Dove Died. Inviting his rival, the fastidious Leonora, to view the ‘exceptionally wide double bed covered in mauve velvet’ in his flat, he enjoys telling her that ‘comfort isn’t all I go for.’Spinsters, clerics, homosexuals – and ...”

“... like it. ‘I’m just having trouble working out what it is you would like to do,’ said Wendy Lord, head of corporate communications. ‘I want to see what you do at Edmonton.’ ‘But we’re quite an old facility. I could arrange for you to visit one of the newer ones.’ ‘I’d prefer to come to Edmonton,’ I said. ‘Just to see how you’re ...”

“... the publication of his Influence of Sea Power upon History. He was dined by Queen Victoria and the Lord Mayor of London, received by the Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister and given honorary degrees by Oxford and Cambridge within the space of a week. The reason? He had written a book which took England as his model, which saw America as ‘civilised’ to ...”

“... what the Conservative Party is for. The pragmatism which Baldwin inherited from the great Lord Salisbury has proved a better guide for most of the ‘Conservative century’. Part of Baldwin’s achievement between the wars was surely to contain the ideologically-driven pressures of faction within his party while opportunistically waiting for the ...”

“... provide Bounty with mezzanine decks; no one at home with British ways of speech could write ‘Lord Cuthbert Collingwood’; and the description of that stout, intrepid botanist Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, as a social dilettante is likely to shake the reader’s confidence in this rambling, sometimes overinstructive, but highly ...”

“... people, who met in pubs, drank draught cider and sometimes read each other their works. It is Lord of the Rings country and yet, interestingly, social nuances appear even in this consciously Christian and nostalgic setting. Tolkien the Catholic could not stand Lewis’s fundamentalist allegory, as exemplified in tales like The Lion, the Witch and the ...”

“... points out that in a letter to Thackeray about his polite rejection of a poem of hers called ‘Lord Walter’s Wife’ as not suited to a family magazine like the Cornhill, Elizabeth discreetly mocked him in words very similar to those used ten years later by Josephine Butler when she led the fight against the Contagious Diseases Act. (Her triumph ensured ...”