“... to the Holocaust, or to the events of 7 October. These anxieties shouldn’t be dismissed. But, as James Baldwin wrote in the late 1960s, ‘one does not wish … to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it ...”

“... the latter part, have really understood what the Conservative Party is for. The pragmatism which Baldwin inherited from the great Lord Salisbury has proved a better guide for most of the ‘Conservative century’. Part of Baldwin’s achievement between the wars was surely to contain the ideologically-driven pressures of ...”

“... at their charts of ‘The Capetian Kings’ or ‘The Royal House of Jerusalem to 1187’ – ‘BALDWIN I (1100 – 1181) m. (1) Godvere of Tosni (2) daughter of T’oros (3) Adelaide, countess of Sicily’ – and getting up from their desks with a feeling of justified completion and a mutter of ‘well, that’s that!’ Here are the pedigrees; here the ...”

“... gentiles’ could also be spun into a reason why the faithful should attend to them. As William Baldwin put it in the upbeat English version of Diogenes which he published in 1547 under the title A Treatise of Morall Philosophye, contayning the Sayinges of the wyse, philosophy was to be studied not for its own sake, but ‘only for this purpose, that we ...”

“... life – cud-chewing, but far from illiberal – associated with the conservatism of Stanley Baldwin. Moreover, the Burkean contrast between English pragmatism and the visionary abstractions of the French Revolution reinforced Baldwin-era distinctions between a native middlebrow conservatism and socialism as an alien ...”

“... Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony than to the inhabitants of ...”

“... if not upside down then round through many degrees. In the story of the Macdonald sisters Stanley Baldwin and Kipling are, for most of the time, children, little seen or heard. Ruskin is a recurring nuisance. We sympathise with Georgiana Macdonald, an independent woman tied by an early marriage to the demanding, fickle, hypochondriac Edward Burne-Jones, who ...”

“... by the judging committee. Seriousness goes with choice: significance of specification. Henry James knew nothing of the world of political correctness, but he did insist on the novel being taken very seriously, the significant subject duly chosen, and fleshed out. The result, in his own case, could become a dull though brilliantly intelligent novel like ...”

“... Moorman’s book concentrates on the period before his return to Cambridge as Regius Professor (a Baldwin appointment) in 1927. Only two of her ten chapters concern his life after 1927, whether from discretion or from lack of materials is not made quite clear. Lord Trevelyan, a diplomatist, throws more light on Trevelyan and his family in ‘The Master’, an ...”

“... of the excised sections of evidence aren’t very well blacked out). And here is a question put by James Dingemans QC (Lord Hutton’s chief – and, currently, chiefly benign – inquisitor) to Alastair Campbell: ‘Mr Powell told us yesterday that you had told him that Mr Baldwin had told you that the person who told him ...”

“... mute are given a say in things,’ Kipling does not, of course, stop short at human beings. Henry James, who admired – indeed adored – him, deprecated this process nonetheless, and in a famous comment once observed that he had abandoned humans for horses, dogs, locomotives and parts of ships. Kipling did give a voice of sorts to all these, and by no means ...”

“... It was​ in the mid-1980s that the short seller James Chanos first realised he was being investigated. People were ‘going through my garbage’, he says. They didn’t find anything incriminating: Chanos lives a ‘nice quiet yuppie existence’, said one of the private investigators, whose report ended up in the hands of the Wall Street Journal ...”

“... Lady Longford on Queen Victoria, Sir Philip Magnus on Edward VII, Lady Donaldson on Edward VIII, James Pope-Hennessy on Queen Mary and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett on George VI. Now the wheel has come full circle, and we are back to George V again. Is there any need for this? If plain history does not repeat itself, is there any reason why royal biography ...”

“... Lloyd George preferred to parade his thoughts before a handful of sympathetic Liberal journalists. Baldwin kept amiably distant. Neville Chamberlain, while courting the newsmen, was most accessible to papers soundly Conservative in tone. Churchill remained aloof except to the more exalted proprietorial ranks, though an editor or two would occasionally be ...”

“... in the work that led to the setting-up of the National Health Service. The world of Stanley Baldwin contained more reasons for admiring W.H. Auden than this book understands. The sense of having read a genuinely responsible work of history of science remains. To take only the most obvious examples from Kevles’s last chapters: his useful warnings ...”