“... has never been about law in the way that written constitutions usually are: it is what John Griffith calls ‘a political constitution’, so that what counts is not what long dead founding fathers or living dead lawyers say you can do but what the electorate will, in your judgment, allow you to get away with (perhaps eventually thanking you for ...”

“... upper stratum’. Capitalist and romantic utopian, man of action and wouldbe philosopher-king, bon viveur and advocate of austerity, Rathenau is perhaps the most contradictory figure in this book. A key organiser of German raw materials in the First World War, and attacked by the Allies as the despoiler of Belgium, Rathenau became a postwar symbol of ...”

“... the Protestant Irish, landowners, protectionists, the City, much of the Church of England and King George V. No Labour Government, not even Attlee’s, faced such a coalition. There was, of course, an unintended element to this; but it was the inevitable outcome of a strategy which originated with Gladstone and was continued by his successors: that you ...”

“... fought for something. Indian soldiers, as their letters reveal, for honour, the British for king and country. As one French soldier said simply, ‘I do not want to become a Boche.’ His fellow soldiers who mutinied in 1917 did so more because they did not want to die in futile attacks than to stop the war itself. For Germans, the war was about saving ...”

“... torments and frightful beasts painted like jewels. More recently, the awakened creature in John Carpenter’s The Thing, and H.R. Giger’s alien in the films of the same name are offered only in brief glimpses, to tease the audience, which wants to look long and hard on their strange and extraordinary beauty. Aesthetically as well as practically, it ...”

“... wan, sometimes wanton, according to the interplay between Humbert’s sentimentality and desire. John le Carré’s Perfect Spy, Magnus Pym, owes his training to a con man father. The only way for the child to know what is going on (Ricky Pym’s words and actions don’t tell him – on the contrary, they are monstrous mystifications) is to keep watch, to ...”

“... is in the process of being transcribed and digitised by a team of scholars from Dartmouth and King’s College London). Carolyn Dever’s Chains of Love and Beauty, the work of two decades, is the first critical book to focus on this enormous manuscript – which she admits is ‘by turns thrilling, boring and impossible; indeed, sometimes all three at ...”

“... It’s also haunted by other works, including Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, John Cheever’s Bullet Park and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road as well as novels by Generation X authors: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm. But the closest point of comparison is the film American Beauty. Both portray a ...”

“... in mutton grease’. Few things give greater pause for thought to the amnesiac ex-commando in John Lodwick’s ambitiously daft Peal of Ordnance (1947) than the state of the box from which he rings the BBC to tell them he has planted a bomb in one of their studios. The booth smelt of urine and spittle gouts. He opened the directory; obsolete, tatty and ...”

“... he looked at, Lorck looked at in a peculiar way. One bundle of drawings, which the diarist John Evelyn owned, was split up and sold at auction in 1966 – the compilers of this catalogue have been advertising rather forlornly in the art trade press for news of their whereabouts. The catalogue is Fischer’s life’s work. Many have worried about what ...”

“... and acts as mediator between his interests and those of the staff. In Fleet Street, the editor is king – so long as he has the king-maker behind him. In such circumstances, he is the final arbiter of what gets into the paper and what is kept out; of how to treat a particular story or article; and in shaping editorial ...”

“... all of these victims were women, children, the elderly, sick or mentally ill, but according to John Laughland in the Spectator, their deaths do not count because most of them are ‘buried in individual not mass graves’. Yet it seems clear to most of us working here that a great deal of violence was inflicted on people in quite small groups. Unprotected ...”

“... for instance, she provides a lively account of the intricate emotional manoeuvres performed by John Banks’s splendidly over-the-top costume drama The Island Queens (banned under Charles II in 1684, rewritten and rehabilitated under Anne as The Albion Queens, 1704), during which Mary and her victorious antitype Elizabeth enjoy the first of their many ...”

“... Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen ...”

“... Blair’s call for the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees to be rewritten, and John Townend’s complaint about the ‘mongrelisation’ of Britain.) Balfour warned Parliament that the Jews ‘remained a people apart, and not merely held a religion differing from the vast majority of their fellow countrymen, but only intermarried among ...”