“... class. In both, this process has been incomplete, perhaps deliberately so. They both have a strong sense of Englishness, though they have defined it with recourse to a radical vocabulary. Both see themselves within an English radical-democratic tradition – Levellers, Paine, Cobden – onto which both have grafted Marxism. This is the fourth volume of ...”

“... The negotiations dragged on for more than a year, by which time the French President felt strong enough to veto British entry. However you look at it, Young’s verdict runs, ‘de Gaulle without doubt treated Macmillan monstrously.’ That is true, and de Gaulle was repeating the British mistake of greatly overestimating his country’s power. All ...”

“... it encourages us to read the poems and the novel in the order of their composition. O’Gorman, a strong proponent of the view that Gondal is the ‘key’ to Emily’s imagination, is quick to point to the much anthologised ‘Remembrance’, first published in 1846. Fifteen years after the death of her great love, Julius Brenzaida, Rosina Alcona imagines ...”

“... that Conservatism ‘has in the end nothing to say for itself’. To be fully convincing, such a strong conclusion would need to be based on a deep study of Conservative thinkers and a rigorous examination of the performance of Conservative governments, in the manner of John Dunn’s highly successful The Politics of Socialism. But that of course is not the ...”

“... rules of the game (to be bent, broken and ignored) and the ferocity of the play remained the same. Roy Thomson, benign among proprietors, has come and gone, picking up a peerage in the process. So has Victor Matthews, moving from building-site to Fleet Street and out again in less than ten years. The free or cut-price offers of dictionaries and flower-pots in ...”

“... Labour leader, Harold Wilson. The ‘warm-up’ was a brilliant speech by the MP for Stechford, Roy Jenkins, who described his leader as ‘the greatest Parliamentarian of his generation’. The acclamation for Wilson as he rose to speak, diminutive behind a huge lectern, was deafening. I noticed that he had few notes – perhaps one sheet of paper with a ...”

“... of a realignment of British politics, but the grip of the two-party system remained obdurately strong. What was revealed under Grimond’s leadership, however, was the party’s developing capacity to serve as a channel for a protest vote. In an age when governments simply did not expect to lose by-elections, the Liberal victory in the rural Devon ...”

“... think differently; but even then it was possible to do so, or to think that ‘failure’ was too strong a word. When he became leader in 1983 the Party seemed almost down and out; it had won just 209 seats in the election of that year, and in terms of votes was in real danger of being overtaken by the Liberal-SDP Alliance. In 1992 Labour won 271 ...”

“... ignore it for the sake of romance. Once Shakespeare became a character, a romantic hero like Rob Roy, known facts were suddenly flexible. Apocryphal episodes like the deer-stealing became, in the wake of Scott, not a means of authenticating Shakespeare, but novelistic material ennobled by him; and lacunae left in his biography by 18th-century commentators ...”

“... interest is necessarily fleeting and who are rarely in a position to make a long-term judgment. ‘Strong’ authorities are replaced by ‘weak’ ones – a pattern made familiar by the previous Government. If, as an index of ‘modernity’, we choose the degree to which effective power is broadly distributed – i.e. the extent of local government’s ...”

“... on a scale that would have gladdened the ruralist heart of a Richard Jefferies. Five years ago, Roy Porter still diagnosed ‘a downward spiral of infrastructural and human problems that will prove hard to halt’. Yet now, when London has slipped way down the table of city-sizes and tours round the eerie magnificence of the Foreign Office induce a Venetian ...”

“... But before this evidence could be presented to the Court of Appeal in 1989, the Crown prosecutor, Roy Amlot QC, told the Court of Appeal of three other major matters which fundamentally undermined the Crown case. The first was that the alleged contemporaneous record of Patrick Armstrong’s interview was not contemporaneous at all, as demonstrated by the ...”

“... a Belfast street song: ‘A white stone step and a clean swept floor’ – two bunches of three strong stresses, that give it an instressed, ecstatic sound. David Hammond sang that song, ‘My Aunt Jane’, to the children and adults at a party in the house a few nights before: My Aunt Jane she took me in she give me sweets outa her wee tin half a bap ...”

“... admires Pankhurst’s politics, for biography is often driven by identification: why else would Roy Jenkins choose to write about Asquith, Conor Cruise O’Brien about Edmund Burke, Michael Foot about Aneurin Bevan, E.P. Thompson about William Morris and (ridiculously) Boris Johnson about Winston Churchill? The problem is rather that identification has led ...”

“... turned out to be highly profitable. French governments, even if not their citizens, had an equally strong incentive: a United Europe was a way of keeping Germany in check. This strategy, which worked pretty well until 1990, may no longer work so well. But at least it is a strategy. What has happened in Britain has a rather different dimension. It is a facing ...”