“... 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 ...”

“... prose writings also describe the Black community she found there. ‘Driving North, Driving Home’, from her essay collection Bread Out of Stone (1998), recalls bars, dancing all night, getting lost in hip-deep snow on the way to a party. ‘They were vibrant and hopeful days,’ she writes. ‘We argued, we debated, we came into the joy of being ...”

“... to address questions of internal security. A full account is given of the battles between the Home Office, on the one hand, and MI5 and the Chiefs of Staff, on the other, over the internment of ‘enemy aliens’. This was the misleading term for refugees, mainly Jewish, who had fled from Hitler’s Germany. The ...”

“... progress when Huxley couldn’t speak for temper? (Hooker thought so.) Did Huxley murmur: ‘the Lord hath delivered him into my hand?’ (Huxley thought so.) And Samuel Wilberforce straightened his lawn sleeves and reckoned he’d seen off the hosts of Midian. But the victors get to write, or rewrite, history, at least when there’s some agreement about ...”

“... life savings. This is a crime that cannot be forgiven. Rick’s ambition is that his son will be Lord Chief Justice – ‘handing down the sentences that had once been handed down to Rick in the days we never owned to’. In fact, Magnus becomes not a dispenser of justice but a virtuoso of dishonesty. In this he remains his father’s son. Working for the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... choice, description and context all important: the grub as grub would probably be far better at home, but the mind wants a change. In several of Ian Fleming’s thrillers James Bond (who is much more interested in food and drink than in sex and killing people) derides the lyric menus of the American eatery, promising flaky-fresh sole and dawn-tender ...”