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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The​ defining characteristics of our political system – a parliamentary monarchy in a union-state – emerged in the course of two fraught decades at the turn of the 18th century, between the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Treaty of Union between England and Scotland in 1707. The revolution of 1688 was glorious largely because – unlike the earlier revolution in the 1640s – it was bloodless (in England at least) and did not require the execution of the sitting monarch ...”

“... Until​ our recent discontents England had never succumbed to doctrinal nationalism. Absent from English history was the obsessiveness found in many countries across Europe about the recovery of authentic nationhood. Although the English have often been perturbed about the condition of England, they have rarely floated nationalist solutions to their problems ...”

“... Why, Bailyn asked, had America not become Canada? More unsettling still was Bailyn’s tour de force, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1975), in which he reconstructed the early stages of the American Revolution through the eyes of Tory loyalists. Wood too, in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), emphasised the abrupt discontinuity of the ...”

“... erase his tracks, we know less about him from his correspondence with friends and allies than we do from the observations of ‘his apoplectic adversaries’, not least Hutchinson, who is both a central source and protagonist here. Is Schiff also ventriloquising Hutchinson? She offers in passing several harsh remarks on Adams’s revolutionary activities and ...”