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“... During the present century the British political system has undergone three periods of severe stress – of strains so serious that the leaders of all the major parties felt obliged to suspend party politics and to combine in coalition governments. The first and third periods of crisis are obvious: the world wars. Here the nature of the threat is evident, and the domestic consequences are familiar – in each case a major advance for the Labour movement and substantial increases in state responsibility for and expenditure upon social and economic reform ...”

“... Publications about the Great War continue to proliferate, hardly needing additional stimulation from the 70th anniversary of the Armistice. The present books are just a few on the subject to appear during 1988, and despite publication dates close to 11 November only one of these seems to be a largely opportunistic production. The reasons for such persistent attention are plain ...”

“... expression, in some unaccountable way, to what the English people think’, the statement was, as Philip Williamson notes in this ambitious new assessment, ‘in any literal sense … untrue’. Similarly with his claim to be ‘voicing what is in the minds of the dumb millions of this country’, though there the assertion was so framed as to make ...”

“... rumbled in a restaurant playing the part of the sober producer by his fellow-actor Nicol Williamson, throws himself with a will into the diarist’s role. The material is shaped and worked-up to considerable effect. Boorman’s instincts, however, are not those of a Woodward or McClintick, investigative reporters who assiduously applied themselves to ...”

“... cryptography was actually invented some years earlier by the English mathematicians Malcolm Williamson and Clifford Cocks at GCHQ Cheltenham, but was kept secret at the time for reasons of security. Independently of this, a mathematically gifted Irish schoolgirl, 16-year-old Sarah Flannery, recently invented a public-key algorithm based on multiplying ...”

“... bloggers clamoured to interview and in some cases canonise her. Heti has been called the heir to Philip Roth, or to Joan Didion, and the literary equivalent of the filmmaker Lena Dunham or the songwriter Frank Ocean, who astonished the luridly heterosexual R’n’B scene last year by recording love songs addressed to his boyfriend. But what if she’d just ...”

“... read and influential thinker of his time. Kings and cardinals queued and competed for his company. Philip II of Spain made him historiographer royal. Rubens, his devoted pupil, painted him as the modern Seneca; and it was through the medium of Lipsius’s edition and commentary that Seneca reached a wide European audience. Lipsius’s own version of Stoic ...”

“... and Marian, Robin (Sean Connery), on his death-bed, shoots an arrow and asks Little John (Nicol Williamson) to bury him and Marian (Audrey Hepburn) close together where it falls. This variant comes from an ancient Indian motif best known in our day from Kipling’s Kim, whose Lama seeks his final enlightenment in a river that sprang up where an arrow ...”

“... from the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic hired, then a few days later fired, Kevin Williamson, a prose stylist at the National Review who suggests that women who have abortions – a quarter of all American women – should be hanged. In this free-for-all, ‘thought leaders’ rise without a trace, at great speed and with little ...”

“... have traditional grammar drummed into them, still falls heavily on English schools. ‘Dear Gavin Williamson, could you tell parents what a fronted adverbial is?’ an article by the children’s writer Michael Rosen demanded of one of Gove’s successors in the job.Before March 2020, I was unfamiliar with the phenomenon of ‘guided reading’. My daughter ...”

“... Oddingley Grange on Trench Lane, whose châtelaine was a Mrs White, aunt of Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Robinson, commanding officer of the Royal Artillery 67th Field Regiment, Territorial Army. Lt Col Robinson approved, and a gruff handshake transformed my father into a second lieutenant, though he had to serve his time as a failed schoolteacher until June ...”