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“... which he traced back, ultimately, to Erasmus. His study of the Huguenot doctor Sir Theodore de Mayerne (1573-1655), put together after his death by one of his most brilliant pupils, Blair Worden, is itself a powerful corrective to the balder version of his own argument. As he recognised, before its decline into localised scholastic sterility – not ...”

“... So abrasively​ right-wing was George W. Bush’s gravel-voiced vice-president, Dick Cheney, that he got the nickname Darth Vader. Out of office he hammed up the part, making public entrances to the Imperial March from Star Wars. He once asked his wife, Lynne, if it annoyed her that people referred to him as Darth Vader. Not at all, she said, ‘it humanises you ...”

“... Low Countries in 1794, and Napoleon – alert to the potential of air war – set up a Compagnie d’Aérostiers. During the invasion panic of 1803, Uglow notes, a new play, Goody Two Shoes; or Harlequin Alabaster, was performed at Sadler’s Wells; in it a French invasion by balloon is foiled at a lighthouse, in the process confounding our own expectations ...”

“... Maurice Cowling was the English intelligentsia’s self-appointed pantomime ogre. Hamming up his villainy, he deliberately courted boos and hisses. In 1990, on the publication of the second edition of his book Mill and Liberalism (1963), he remembered with delight that one of its original reviewers had ‘obligingly’ described it as ‘“dangerous and unpleasant”, which was what it was intended to be ...”

“... Notwithstanding​ the 55:45 split between unionists and nationalists in the independence referendum last autumn, the major – if unacknowledged – cleavage in Scottish politics lies within the SNP itself, between its cannily cautious leadership and its enthusiastic rank and file. The SNP has grown phenomenally since last September, when it had about 25,000 members, to its current tally of more than 100,000 ...”

“... with wit, cerebral depth and a marvellous turn of phrase. But reductionism of this sort won’t do, as Richard Bourke shows in his erudite and compelling study of Burke’s political life. Burke’s earliest works, before his engagement to the Rockingham Whigs, were concerned with fundamental questions in political philosophy and aesthetics. The Tory ...”

“... rise in support of the Stuarts was risky enough when backed up by a foreign army and navy; but to do so in the absence of overseas support seems reckless. Yet Szechi shows that the rising of 1715 drew in more supporters than the better known escapade of 1745. He reckons that the maximum strength of the Jacobite armies in 1715 was about fourteen thousand Scots ...”

“... Enoch-land repels. A hard Brexit will make the choices facing Scots more painful still. Do we cut ourselves off from European markets, or from our largest market by far, the English market with which we have been integrated since 1707? Despite the blindingly obvious arithmetic favouring economic union with England, Scots presented with a second ...”

“... The events of the story take place in a country house whose archive has attracted the attention of Dr Wenceslaus Bottwink, a Central European Jew and expert on the high politics of the reign of George III. In the course of his researches on certain ‘confidential letters’ written by Lord Bute in the early 1760s, Bottwink also manages to solve a ...”

“... with the other ladies after dinner, for example. Macaulay’s first wife had been a friend of Dr Johnson’s, and this brought the radical second Mrs Macaulay into the social orbit of the domineering Tory traditionalist. On one occasion, Johnson – irritated by her convictions – seemingly encouraged her footman to join them at table. Surely she ...”

“... ancient constitution with the unstable history of revolutions, counter-revolutions and coups d’état in France since 1789. The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 pointed up a further distinction, between the rigidity of America’s codified constitution – unsuited to absorbing change without convulsion – and Westminster’s looser, more ...”

“... communitarians of the wishful thinking they themselves detect in a spent liberalism. Against can-do optimism of the sort which infects even the hardheaded programme set out in Amitai Etzioni’s The Spirit of Community, Ferguson was inoculated threefold. He was, first, a self-conscious Newtonian, concerned to substitute an intense observation of the moral ...”

“... market-driven Conservatism we have known since the Thatcher era. Indeed, in asserting that ‘we do not believe in untrammelled free markets,’ it openly rejected Thatcherite certainties. But after this startling anti-laissez-faire manifesto, which was blamed by many for nearly losing the election, the campaign descended, as Timothy acknowledges, into ...”

“... markets, especially before and during the draws: the loan came from the purchase by the well-to-do of expensive tickets, some of which carried special prizes, and all of which entitled the bearer to an annuity. England’s financial revolution enabled this formerly middle-ranking power to emerge as a dominant player in international relations, but it was by ...”

“... surrounded by an indifferent, if not actively hostile, Catholic population, they could presumably do little harm. In the winter of 1733-4 the cause célèbre in English Court politics was the question of whether Thomas Rundle, another of Queen Caroline’s favourites, would win preferment to the see of Gloucester. In the end, his heterodoxy was deemed too ...”