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“... secured, it was hoped, Russian influence in this key buffer region would be stymied. Planned by Lord Auckland, and facilitated by the spying of the handsome Great Gamer Alexander Burnes, the war was fabulously simple in conception. The British would assemble a vast expeditionary force, and march on Kabul. By the time it began its ponderous progress into ...”

“... Through​ a failure of statecraft on a scale unmatched since Lord North lost the American colonies, David Cameron has managed to convert a problem of party management into a constitutional crisis. The result of the EU referendum raises serious constitutional issues which haven’t been properly confronted. The media are now comfortably immersed in the political consequences of the result – the tenor of a Theresa May government, the pressure on Jeremy Corbyn – and lawyers have been called on to consider the status of the referendum vote and the technicalities involved in triggering Article 50 ...”

“... The James painting was worked on over the summers of 1910 and 1911, at Hill House, the Epping home of the hostess and patron Mary Hunter. She was the wife of a coal baron and said it was her ‘sacred duty’ to spend all her husband’s money. In that ambition she seems to have been mostly successful. James, Rodin, Thomas Beecham, Edith Wharton, Sargent ...”

“... nodded again. He seemed patiently puzzled, stupefied by his misfortunes. He explained that his home was a square of mat upon a terrace, the balcony of a hotel belonging to a rapacious landlord who let him sleep there for an exorbitant sum. No, he was not married. For who would marry Gokhale with his prospects? And where would he live with his wife? In a ...”

“... of confusion, mixture, indiscriminacy. Corinna, the unfaithful mistress, who comes ‘spewing home/Drencht with the Seed of half the Town’, is an emblem of promiscuity in more than one sense.Rochester​ ran risks with his satires. Over Christmas in 1673, by accident and probably while drunk, he handed the king a copy of his lampoon about pricks and ...”

“... more that ‘the centre of gravity of that exploitation has shifted … to peripheral workers, home workers, ad hoc workers,’ not to mention the ‘greater immiseration and exploitation’ of ‘the massed-up workers of the Third World’.‘There was no attempt on the part of Marxism Today to rethink society from the ground up in terms of Marxist ...”

“... the children’, with furious oratory at Westminster (sneered at as ‘pink’ by Maclean back home). He told how his own wife had lost her life struggling to save her baby’s. He denounced as ‘murderers’ those who voted to withdraw milk from the list of entitlements to mothers and children. In 1932, he led the ILP out of the Labour Party. Jennie Lee ...”

“... partly devised by Powell himself, of assisted repatriation for immigrants who wanted to return home. Powell does mention this policy in his speech, but then carries on in his tone of vatic despair, encouraging the illusion that nothing was being done. We were ‘watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre’. We were ...”

“... most dangerous product of modern civilisation – still, as in Florence, accompanied by the young Lord Douglas, the two of them put on the Index in both London and Paris and, were one not so far away, the most compromising companions in the world’. Wilde, he wrote, was ‘charming, at the same time; unimaginable, and, above all, a very great personality ...”

“... Scottish Parliament since the Union of 1707. And almost 42 per cent of the electorate stayed at home. It did rain, I suppose. Since the devolution referendum of 1997, media attention has largely focused on the threat posed by the SNP to the integrity of the United Kingdom. This in turn has provoked an English nationalist backlash among Tory ...”

“... on the back of an idea whose time has come. For they know – even if we don’t – that, in Lord Zuckerman’s words, ‘the decisions which we make today in the fields of science and technology determine the tactics, then the strategy, and finally the politics of tomorrow.’ And of course in a sense they are right. The probability of a major nuclear ...”

“... an own-goal in his team’s unlikely draw against the Americans, was gunned down on his return home by an embittered betting syndicate. And, to make things even worse, Britain wasn’t even represented. In this, at least, the Finals which begin next month will be different. On 10 June, Scotland will play Brazil at the Stade de France in the opening ...”

“... The next decade witnessed efforts to prevent Rab Butler – variously chancellor of the exchequer, home secretary, foreign secretary, party chairman and deputy prime minister, but also a ‘man of Munich’, i.e. an appeaser, and, possibly worse, a non-Etonian intellectual – succeeding to the Tory leadership. In early 1957 Harold Macmillan grabbed the ...”

“... a credit to the public school education which its authors decried); and a short spell in a remand home, after his desperate and uncomprehending mother called the police when he turned up at home riotously drunk. Then, aged only 16, Romilly was off to join the International Brigades in Spain. Some of that irksome OTC ...”

“... in the 1940s argued about the urgency of such advice, which is one huge rhetorical advantage the Home Front material has over early 21st-century confusion, peak oil awareness and general eco-fear. ‘Of course you like your slice of toast at breakfast. But toast is a dangerous “fuel thief”. You would hardly believe it but if one household gave up toast ...”