“... Keynes in the 1980s, now talks cheerfully about the union hiring a lobbyist who used to work for William Hague, Philip Snape, to press its anti-privatisation case with the coalition. Context has changed too. Even as the old empire of Britain’s postal bureaucrats began to crumble with the split-off of British Telecom under Margaret Thatcher in 1981, a ...”

“... was to keep the boilers fired and steam up. Films ranging from the wartime In Which We Serve to James Cameron’s Titanic have portrayed the scramble for the ladder and the closing watertight door when the ship tilts and the sea pours in – the perfect ingredients for the audience’s later claustrophobic nightmares. But how did men live with this fearful ...”

“... a year or so later, is also board- (and perhaps bored-) stiff. Five years on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of Doncaster: a mercer dressed in good brown velvet with a great belly swelling above spread knees, and arms akimbo. This pose of the fat man of authority (it is similar to the one Ingres put M. Bertin the banker in) would be used ...”

“... problem, in the Section’s eyes, was unemployment. The younger economists in the Section, notably James Meade, developed the approach outlined by Keynes in the General Theory published in 1936. Robbins himself had initially rejected Keynes in favour of the ‘classical’ position, but was in process of being converted and was content to leave the younger ...”

“... the general consensus in the early days was that television and politics didn’t mix. Thus Sir William Haley, Director-General of the BBC in the late Forties, believed that television was totally unsuited to political discussion. The ‘Fourteen Day Rule’, under which no subject likely to be debated in the Commons within the next fortnight could be ...”

“... after 1776 compelled London officials to find other locations where convicts could be dumped. As James Matra explained in 1783, the British turned to Botany Bay to ‘atone for the loss of our American colonies’. Ekirch opens his fascinating account with the 1718 passage of the Transportation Act. The Members of Parliament, like many substantial citizens ...”

“... Attorney’s office, and the fortuitous presence of the Canadian intelligence co-ordinator Sir William Stephenson, Gouzenko might have shared the wretched fate of his ambassador, bundled onto a Soviet freighter in New York for home, and the mercies of the KGB. The pattern didn’t change until the Sixties, when we began to breed our own moles. Mr ...”

“... and it is in fact disputed by the editor of this volume. Donat Gallagher teaches English at the James Cook University of North Queensland; his case for a ‘complete’ collection of Waugh’s essays and articles rests on his subject’s ‘exceptional talent as a writer, and vigour and independence as a thinker’. These qualities Waugh certainly had in ...”

“... caused an outburst of public indignation in Britain. When it emerged that the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, had authorised the opening of Mazzini’s correspondence, he was attacked in Parliament for resorting to ‘the spy system of foreign states’ and Carlyle wrote to the Times that opening of men’s letters was ‘a practice near of kin to picking ...”

“... and the spoonerism. So I read a book about Spooner, published by W.H. Allen in 1977, by Sir William Hayter, Warden of New College, Oxford 1958-1976. Throughout the book he describes the spoonerism as ‘metaphasis’, a word which is not in the OED. The correct word is ‘metathesis’. He must have misheard it at High Table. This error is repeated in ...”

“... circle round the National Review. That conservatism would not exist but for the dramatic wit of William Buckley, a wit which has choreographed into a not too discordant and blundering ballet a motley cast of themes and characters. Wills’s lively account, in his autobiographical Confessions of a Conservative (1979), of the conflicts in a group that has ...”

“... have given Margaret Thatcher. The uncertainty which the absence of a Parliamentary majority caused James Callaghan in the last Labour government was of a kind and degree for which many an American President would gladly have settled. The Constitution fragments political power by completely separating the executive from the legislature, and by separating both ...”

“... Here, he makes a genuine contribution. Looming over Rakove’s account is the figure of James Madison, the diminutive, colourless Virginian who, although never accorded the place in popular memory enjoyed by his contemporaries, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, fathered the Constitution and offered the most compelling rationale for ...”

“... in Panama with the indigenous people there rather than continue to sail north with the explorer William Dampier, thought the cultivation methods worth reporting: ‘the Indians set them’ – banana trees – ‘in rows or walks, without under-wood; and they make very delightful groves. They cut them down to get at the fruit; and the Bodies being green and ...”

“... The suicides of Harriet Shelley and Fanny Imlay, the deaths of Mary’s children Clare in 1818 and William in 1819, coming so close together must have had for her the weight of a curse. This story of 1820 seems to say that in a family where only forbidden affections can thrive it is better that all life cease. Read alongside Frankenstein, it also confirms Jay ...”