“... 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 ...”

“... a hiatus: he emerged from the jungle in 1914, after a year-long expedition, and promptly returned home to join the fight, it being ‘the patriotic desire of all able-bodied men to squash the Teuton’. He spent three years in the hell of the trenches, including the Somme, and was awarded the DSO for valour. In early 1919 he returned to the family ...”

“... carriage horse. Forrest describes the affection felt by workers for their animals:‘He never came home from work until [his horse] Tabby was comfortable for the night,’ recalled the niece of one carter at the Coventry Station goods depot. Another man there would ‘bike out into the country, go down in the hedgerow, pull out my knife … And I’d cut a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I remember two furious old teachers driving me and my six-year-old girlfriend Heather Watt home early one morning. In recent weeks, we had been walking the mile to school in the company of a boy, smaller and younger than ourselves, a fragile boy with ginger hair called David. I think we thought of him as ‘our boy’. We bossed him. Occasionally, when ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and the retrocession of the Transvaal. The Royal Commission preparing the climb-down met in the home of Haggard and his wife, to whom they paid a handsome rent. It was an exquisitely shaming episode, illustrating what would later be defined as the craven fear of being great. Kipling was too young to be contemplating a poem called ‘Retrocessional’. In ...”

“... bill of rights, part of the original policy behind the 1996 consultation paper Bringing Rights Home, which introduced the Human Rights Act. Now that the rights included in the European Convention on Human Rights have been brought home, is it time to start a family of new rights, and possibly of duties, to go with ...”

“... or mutilate my published work seems to me somewhat like deserting one’s colours,’ he told Lord Lytton. ‘One may or may not repent having enlisted, but to lay down one’s arms, except under compulsion, remains intolerable.’ Politically, Swinburne saw himself as an apostle of liberalism, supporting ...”

“... types of creative imagination.The remarkable, and to many incomprehensible, success of The Lord of the Rings shows that Ker’s concepts are not entirely fossilised, even today. Gentrified and emasculated as it is by Edwardian, Wind in the Willows-type fantasy, the world of Tolkien’s narrative still has some genuine ingredients from Dark Age epic and ...”