“... continued their South African practice of convening regular ‘moots’, which were frequently held at Cliveden, a palatial house near Windsor. This book deals with the core members of the set: Lothian, judged by another member to be ‘airy and viewy’, a Roman Catholic who converted to Christian Science, became private secretary to Lloyd George in the ...”

“... was crucial to the Government’s case to demonstrate that the British Convention which had been held in Edinburgh in October 1793 as part of a campaign to obtain universal manhood suffrage constituted an overt act of treason: that Convention delegates planned to overthrow the Government and by extension intended the destruction of the King. This argument ...”

“... labourers and workmen’: on the contrary, in the second edition of the Wealth of Nations, Smith held that ‘high profits tend much more to raise the price of work than high wages.’ Above all, he hoped that a universal system of public instruction in science and philosophy would enable working people to transcend the narrow perspectives and ...”

“... from Dreyfus, we can see what Proust meant. Yet the Iraq crisis had been unfolding before Dr David Kelly’s death – whatever Lord Justice Hutton’s inquiry concludes – and the sense that Iraq did not cause but nevertheless represents a crisis of the Labour Party has been with us for months now. The extent of the continued underfunding of the public ...”

“... the veil everywhere except the home, so much as an attempt to end the intrusion of dogmas held by private individuals and groups into public space. Nor is it as brazen as the German approach, which is shaping up, in some regions, as a piece of discrimination against Islamic signs alone, leaving crosses and yarmulkas within the law; in the French ...”

“... to sell supplies to the British invaders (on one occasion sleds, when the British advance was held up by snow). ‘They do say it is wrong to supply an innimy and I think so too,’ one militia officer confessed; ‘but I don’t call that man my innimy who buys what I have to sell, and gives such a genteel price for it. We have worse innimies than you ...”

“... with enthusiasm in 1984-85, as more rough and ready activists, reminiscent of the ‘denims’ in David Peace’s miners’ strike novel, GB84. But Gildea’s history of community mobilisation challenges the Conservatives’ depiction of unionised miners as a threat to democracy, Thatcher’s ‘enemy within’.Raymond Williams thought that the ...”

“... across the globe was always part of domestic life.’ In an appendix to Ornamentalism (2001), David Cannadine described the way his father, who had been stationed overseas during World War Two, ‘talked endlessly about India’. Unlike Hall and Cannadine, Bernard Porter remembered the empire coming up rarely during his childhood – no family connections ...”

“... Among them was the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had travelled to Sri Lanka with David Miliband to argue, in vain, for a truce. Rajapaksa’s remark was in one sense a tribute to how Kouchner has changed the world. It is Kouchner, more than anyone, who has eroded the distinction between philanthropy and combat. As a young gastroenterologist ...”

“... and natural history within a ‘big history’ such as those outlined by the American writers David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown – or, in the terminology of Edward O. Wilson, in a ‘consilience’, a convergence of intellectual disciplines, humanities with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to ...”

“... their patchy intonation. Elgar, Adrian Boult, Henry Wood, Thomas Beecham: the gentleman-conductors held sway, stiff and upholstered on the podium, their white moustaches like frozen waterfalls, their batons cocked like riding crops. Elgar famously told the teenaged Yehudi Menuhin, who was about to record his Violin Concerto under the composer’s ...”

“... a complicated distribution debacle led to another cull in 1957. Even then, those laid off rarely held it against Lee personally.The comics were strictly product, however. When Kirby and Simon started having hits with romance titles published elsewhere, Goodman ordered Lee to follow suit. Imitative cycles of horror, western and giant monster comics followed ...”

“... was his gimmick, the thing that made him different. He never wore a tie. It could also be what held him back, kept him out on the race-courses in all weathers. He looked after his family, forged a workable alliance with the Jewish teams in the East End; an admirable man in many ways. Yet he has slipped from public consciousness (if you exclude being one of ...”

“... about how to use Milner in our daily lives: Emilia Halton-Hernandez’s The Marion Milner Method, David Russell’s Marion Milner: On Creativity and Akshi Singh’s In Defence of Leisure, forthcoming this spring, which is described as a book about ‘experiments in living with Marion Milner’. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of these books ...”

“... when they landed in Ireland, a public rhetoric soon developed in which the Irish and the Jews were held to have a great deal in common: Ireland had never persecuted the Jews, not just because it didn’t let them in, as Mr Deasy says in Ulysses, but because of an Act of Grattan’s Parliament in 1796, four years before the Act of Union, which allowed ...”