“... media, and some pretty strange ideas about how they should be made to live. We have recently seen Lord Scarman poking about like some wise old lizard in the smashed sitting-rooms of Railton Road. Three years ago, Richard Clutterbuck asked this judicial veteran of Grunwick and Red Lion Square what he thought would be the likeliest causes of political violence ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”