“... returned with a vengeance in 1942, as Graham Smith unsparingly describes in When Jim Crow met John Bull. The British Cabinet groaned at the prospect of an invasion of black troops. Anthony Eden wanted them sent elsewhere and claimed they would be unable to withstand the British weather. It was important not to upset America, but equally important not to ...”

“... Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell united in their distaste for the robust feminist arguments of John Stuart Mill. ‘In short, J.S. Mill’s head is, I dare say, very good, but I feel disposed to scorn his heart,’ sniffed Charlotte in a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell. ‘Woman must obey,’ Christina Rossetti wrote in 1879. ‘Her office is to be man’s ...”

“... Sexual Dissidence, have caused scarcely a ripple outside the literary critical lagoon, but when John Boswell, a rather old-fashioned medieval historian, claimed to have discovered evidence for gay marriages being celebrated and blessed inside Christian churches, he made waves. It is not altogether obvious why the suggestion should be so shocking. Why is it ...”

“... of his conviction that ‘what was really at stake’ was power, not ideas, he chooses to ignore major currents of colonial thought. (It is certainly odd to encounter a book on the coming of the Revolution in which the words ‘liberalism’ and ‘republicanism’ do not appear in the index and the Country Party ideology is treated in a single ...”

“... a kinship with that Ezra Pound are likely to be ignored. This is the case with the American poet John Peck, who, now in his late fifties, with a massive and challenging achievement behind him and the devotion of an active British publisher, is unknown not only to general readers but to those who think they know about modern poetry. To be strictly ...”

“... so passed, in this city of sinister charm (once described by Gore Vidal as ‘the Vatican of the John Birch Society’), in an agony of boredom and irrelevance. And then the ABC News Nightline team, the flagship of supposedly serious coverage, announced that it was vacating its skybox and leaving town. No story. Thus did the grand tradition of Convention ...”

“... years. When he died at last in 1868, the Daily Telegraph sounded a Last Post for ‘the old drum-major of the army of liberty’; and if there were other less generous memories, time had no doubt softened the bitterness which his by then distant political activities had so frequently generated. As with the white cobra in Kipling’s ‘The King’s ...”

“... seven such classes, Halsey eight. Halsey’s eight classes are then further aggregated into three major social classes with a managerial/administrative ‘Service Class’ at the top (Classes I and II), an ‘Intermediate Class’ (Classes III, IV and V), which is not at all like the ‘middle class’ of colloquial usage, and a ‘Working Class’ (Classes ...”

“... virtually all other political forces in the country), the new South Korean Army was shattered by major mutinies: some large towns were held by mutineers with local support for up to a week. In May 1949 two frontier battalions defected, with their officers, to the North. Meanwhile, guerrilla warfare broke out throughout much of the South, and was particularly ...”

“... Terry Eagleton argued that modern British culture had proved incapable of producing a major writer who could analyse society as a whole. It had collapsed into a ‘withered empiricism’. And English poetry in this century has seemed to many to confirm this analysis, the dominant voice being one of cautious ‘common sense’ tinged with a wistful ...”

“... of Commons have been used to rub off the glamour of three years ago. Even his wife, then seen as a major asset, is now apparently a witch whose dangerous influence equals Nancy Reagan’s with the President. But nothing has changed in three years to justify such a reassessment. It is the shallowness of much press comment and its inability to reach a balanced ...”

“... the 1960s and 1970s, in books like Geoffrey Ashe’s The Quest for Arthur’s Britain (1968) and John Morris’s The Age of Arthur (1973). Professional historians have long been embarrassed by the whole thing, but the image created – Roman cavalry leader rallies the British after the Roman army withdrawal and fights off hordes of invading Angles and Saxons ...”

“... maritime power: ‘We have a highly-developed island economy, world-wide interests and major national resources lying under the seas around us, and depredations in the strength of the Royal Navy must cease now if we are to continue to be adequately protected.’ Mr Speed is on more controversial ground in his numerous hints that Britain should give ...”

“... from the inbuilt contradictions of the newly established Protestant Church of England. His first major job came in one of the surviving cathedrals. Francis Mallett, then dean of Lincoln, had once been Archbishop Cranmer’s chaplain, but after Protestant waverings became one of Queen Mary’s most stridently Catholic chaplains: his continued tenure at ...”

“... by Bill Clinton, and stayed on through 9/11 up until 2005, when he became the principal deputy to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence. In 2006, George W. Bush appointed him director of the CIA, where he stayed until 2009, when Barack Obama replaced him with Leon Panetta. During Hayden’s ten years at the top, the intelligence ...”