“... Central Office, provides the focal point of Tim Shipman’s Fall Out. The book is a fly-on-the-wall account compiled from off-the-record interviews with many of the dramatis personae in Theresa May’s topsy-turvy first year as prime minister. There is much here that leaves the reader uneasy – including a portent of our stodgy post-Brexit future, the ...”

“... shape British social history over the last four decades: Ross McKibbin, Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce. I should say before I go any further that I too am a modern British historian: this is my subject and my tribe. I’ve met the dedicatees, most of the editors and a majority of the contributors to these volumes; a few are good friends. But for ...”

“... been dominated by nationalism, the most poetic of all political currents. It is hard to imagine Patrick Pearse chairing a finance committee. The former prime minister Garret FitzGerald, a writer and intellectual as well as a politician, is said to have remarked of a certain policy proposal: ‘That’s all right in practice, but will it work in ...”

“... husband, who painfully reconstructs the story from her presence in the painting on a gallery wall. ‘“Hello, missus!” I used to say, entering the kitchen. Not perfect perhaps ... but that is my way of showing affection,’ he explains drily, having missed what passed between drover, ‘a real mystery man’, and wife when the drover offered the ...”

“... in the Olden Time was the artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was Thomas Rymer, not Edward; it was in the ruins of the Capitol, not the Colosseum, that Gibbon conceived the idea of the Decline and Fall; and Rothesay is not an island. It would be ...”

“... income tax or the levy on land values advocated by the Webbs and others, the writing was on the wall for their autonomy. Describing the British system of government to Germans in 1903, Josef Redlich was amazed that central and local authorities were equal before the law. The corollary, of course, was an absence of constitutional safeguard, as Davis’s ...”

“... or oceanic experience. Reading in bed, he looks up and notices a tapestry on the opposite wall. ‘In a flash, so quick that it occupied the fraction of a second, I understood the whole meaning of existence.’ When a poet such as Yeats says such things we are disposed to take them more seriously, but although it claims relatively little this passage ...”

“... regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance than Nash’s Regent Street, and one ruined pointed arch than all Wren’s churches put together.’ Little has changed. Antiquarian prejudice and ecclesiastical philistinism are in good shape, self-righteous as ever.Gavin Stamp was not ...”

“... grey, a three-decker pulpit, Jacobean altar rails and the remains of whitewash-blurred medieval wall-paintings. It’s an immensely appealing place, not unlike Lead in Yorkshire or Heath near Ludlow. Good graves on the north side, some for a family called Secker who seem to live in the manor house across the field, a romantic rambling house that looks ...”

“... the city to connect stations on its outskirts via the centre has its origins in the town planner Patrick Abercrombie’s utopian plans for postwar London. For Abercrombie, the Blitz had created an opportunity: we could pack displaced Londoners off to ‘new towns’, plant vegetables where their houses had been, and sink the railways. Blackfriars ...”

“... morning dew, five hundred miles away.’ Edward Dorn.) Even Ben Watson, whose poodle parlour is wall to wall with off-piste names, admits (in conversation) that he has never been introduced to Woolf’s work: ‘My book’s sub-plot is Philip K. Dick, sales-talk, Hollywood and schitzophrenia.’ So I’m forced to ...”

“... have been written by Richard Neustadt. There is much to be gained from Jenkins’s insights but Patrick Renshaw’s study, though equally succinct, is much more substantial. Renshaw is a specialist in American economic and labour history, and, as might be expected, his book has most to say about domestic policy: the whole of Roosevelt’s foreign policy ...”

“... which looked at a close-knit working-class community against the backdrop of town planner Patrick Abercrombie’s scheme to clear slums and rehouse residents in ‘overspill’ estates in London’s outskirts (Poplar was intended to be emptied by two-thirds). Willmott and Young painted a sentimental portrait of working-class resilience rooted in ...”

“... timelessness, relished but without striving for effect. We are in the world of Briggflatts, of Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘The Great Hunger’ or Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran. Let me quote two descriptions from the novel, one of an interior, the other of a meal taken outdoors. In the first, Bjartur’s son has been tapping on the roof and squeaking, to get ...”

“... shillings apiece and an early Mason’s Ironstone soup dish that cost sixpence and hangs on the wall of the kitchen. Local houses used to be full of treasures from Reg: model steam engines, maple mirrors, Asian Pheasant plates, rummers, all picked up for a song. Once I saw a can of film (empty) with ‘Moholy-Nagy’ round the rim, and only this last year ...”