“... my anglicisation, in ignoring my early detested life.’ He never stopped detesting America, his home town and the parents who so generously supported him: ‘I loathe – loathe – loathe them and despise this pseudo so-called civilisation,’ and the ‘ghastly god-forgotten hole of Chicago’.Both men went to Oxford, though in different ...”

“... Bonaparte.When this stuff happened nearly four hundred years ago, English Parliamentarians went home and ground their swords to an edge. Not this time. The courage and integrity of most MPs flare up only briefly before they fizzle. My autumn forecast is rapid deadlock, an uproar of scatological cartooning, another Tory rebellion and finally the ...”

“... first that when you speak of the United Kingdom you are speaking of three separate jurisdictions. Northern Ireland’s has moved in fairly close conformity with that of England and Wales in terms of public law (although on some topics, notably the use and misuse of public interest immunity to protect national security, England and Wales could well learn ...”

“... insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the 1960s’. Three years later, Thatcher blamed the 1960s for ‘“the block mentality: tower blocks, trade-union block votes, block schools” and the insidious cult of “breaking the rules”’. In the ...”

“... of Britishness, the memory of his dishonour. ‘Potter’s Field’ is not a term much used in Ireland, though we have many traditional burial plots for strangers. These are marked ‘Cillíní’ on Ordnance Survey maps. Sometimes translated as ‘children’s graveyard’, the sites contain the graves of unbaptised infants, but also of women who died in ...”

“... further from society as a whole. It is an appeal to the baser sentiments of Middle England by a Home Secretary who does not accept the need to preserve a balance between the powers of the state and the rights of defendants. It signals that those accused of crime do not deserve our protection. The Bill is 374 pages long and its stated aim is ‘the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... terms that were satisfactory to him and to Pompidou, a period probably extended by the need for Ireland and Denmark to do the same (Norway having opted out). The arithmetic in the Commons was not unfavourable. The Tories had 330 MPs to 288 Labour, six Liberals and six others. But although at least forty Conservative MPs were against joining the EEC, 69 ...”

“... London get a properly elected local authority in the celebrated form of the London County Council. Home to progressive Liberals (and even the odd Fabian councillor such as Sidney Webb) in the 1890s and early 1900s, the LCC eventually attracted the hostility of rate-payers and fell in 1907 to the Conservatives, who ran the Council until Herbert Morrison ...”

“... determined timetable, keeping their hands clean of the bloodshed that followed? Nobody mentioned Northern Ireland, the place where many British soldiers serving in Iraq were trained in counter-insurgency. For my part, I was less struck by any single imperial precedent than by the historians’ insistence on the present-day relevance of their ...”

“... brother. In the aftermath of the plot the disloyally Whiggish Russells were proscribed from high office. One of the pariahs, Edward Russell, a discarded senior naval officer and grandson of the 4th Earl, was among the seven aristocrats who signed the invitation to William of Orange in 1688. In the aftermath of the Glorious ...”

“... unwillingness to be constrained by the rules or inertia of the EU. When she faced a backlash at home she reached, just as significantly, for another solution of her own, this time securing what amounted to a bilateral agreement with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (presented as an EU deal in March 2016), to halt the flow of refugees from ...”

“... oeuvre also encompasses pub life, literary life, the British film industry in the Thirties, war in Northern Ireland and London, campus uprisings in the Sixties and hippy cults in the Seventies, not to mention such subjects as abortion, adultery, alcoholism, voyeurism, necrophilia, black magic, and the awfulness of MPs. There is a lot of the world in ...”

“... he was years older than me, I dressed him down like a schoolmaster and threatened to have him sent home. He took his wigging humbly but calmly and was so ingenious in his excuses that in the end he made me laugh.’Sidney Reilly, the British spy who could charm almost anyone and talk his way out of (or into) almost anything, was born sometime in the early ...”

“... count, as political choices narrow and promises of difference on the hustings dwindle or vanish in office. With this generalised involution has come a pervasive corruption of the political class, a topic on which political science, talkative enough on what in the language of accountants is termed the democratic deficit of ...”