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“... they want, these Brexiteers? The fantasies of hardliners such as Liam Fox, Daniel Hannan and Jacob Rees-Mogg are based on dimly learned lessons from British history. The mantra of ‘Global Britain’ resurrects an ideal of laissez-faire from the era of Manchester cotton mills and New World slavery. Discussing the range of Brexit options at a Tory Conference ...”

“... for such an unlikely administration. For the position of chief science adviser, Thiel suggested William Happer, America’s most prominent climate sceptic and a man who had compared the demonisation of fossil fuels to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. Trump eventually fobbed off Happer with a lowlier position, and even that proved too much: Happer left the ...”

“... things that could produce consensus between Jeremy Corbyn, Arlene Foster, Vince Cable and Jacob Rees-Mogg, but opposition to May’s deal was one. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, responded to the result with a tweet urging the UK ‘to clarify its intentions as soon as possible’. But what if ‘the UK’ does not possess any ...”

“... more traditional kind.’ Trump is one result of this. Similarly, James Meek has observed of Jacob Rees-Mogg thathis career shows how much like sport British politics has become, where politicians have fans and supporters, rather than voters who are swayed by their arguments or troubled by their extra-parliamentary activities. If you don’t support the ...”

“... it has to mean this. It is because in the years that followed the ousting of the Stuarts, as Sir William Anson neatly put it in The Law and Custom of the Constitution, the Crown ceased to govern through ministers and ministers began to govern through the Crown that an issue like the prorogation crisis has been able to arise. The role of the Privy ...”

“... address that ‘white people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt’; Jacob Rees-Mogg, who railed against the state of a country his party has ruled for thirteen years; the backbench MP Miriam Cates, who blamed ‘cultural Marxism’ for declining birth rates. Before the conference started, journalists and paying punters milled around ...”

“... or the Maison Dieu, an extraordinary medieval hospice, restored by the great Victorian architect William Burges, which turns out to be open only on Wednesdays. To take in the impressive view from the Western Heights, visitors must first locate a narrow path leading from a nondescript car park to a disused gun platform; they don’t do so in droves. There are ...”

“... Peters, Minister of Religion’ in 1983, getting seven questions right on his chosen subject (William Temple, former archbishop of Canterbury) and nine wrong. He claimed, falsely, to have written a book called Know Yourself. Simon Winchester blurbs Sisman’s book as an ‘utterly mad and wholly delightful story of chicanery and fantasy … which involves ...”

“... like that. He laughs in the wrong place at a friend’s poetry reading. He giggles at names like Rees-Mogg, and splits his sides at the list of those who supported Count Tolstoy (ha ha) in the recent painful court case: Prince Dmitri Galitzine, for instance, and Princess Tatiana Metternich (ho ho). He finds his jokes good enough to repeat, like the one about ...”

“... is debatable. The OED defines it, capaciously enough, as ‘of, relating to, or characteristic of William Hogarth or his style; resembling or characteristic of the subjects depicted in Hogarth’s work’, and explains that ‘much of the work of Hogarth is characterised by the use of satire to examine questions of morality, and often features vivid ...”

“... confident that she will finally triumph when at some future date she sees her son crowned as King William V. If Charles was an authentically noble or heroic figure, it might be possible to agree with him that he is trapped in a latterday Greek tragedy. As it is, the spectacle of these two sad, spoiled, solipsistic individuals slugging it out in public via ...”

“... to protect or nurture the Indian textile industry against the competition from Lancashire, Lord William Bentinck lamented that ‘the misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India.’ It is of the essence of imperial power, old-style or new-style, that it accepts no formal ...”

“... the ‘desire to abolish … capitalism’. Under a new speaker vetting scheme introduced by Jacob Rees-Mogg last year, eight people have been disinvited from speaking at government events, including Dan Kaszeta, a chemical weapons expert, and Kate Devlin, who studies the interaction between humans and technology. Both were told their invitations had been ...”