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“... taxation without representation’ became a political demand for liberty, changed everything. Major John Cartwright (who was later to advise the Manchester radicals) and Thomas Paine were influenced by the American programme in their arguments for domestic reform, Take Your Choice! and Common Sense. Yet it was the French Revolution that made the ...”

“... legal baggage. Criminal forgery – in the form of counterfeit money or altered wills – is a major felony. Like poisoning, or arson, it receives sentences of medieval harshness. Literary forgery is much hazier. Meum and Tuum are routinely confused in creative writing. Many of literature’s conventions – the ‘found’ manuscript, the ‘true ...”

“... us benevolently. What’s that, a shirt you’ve got there? All is ready, I think, for this major tryst that was going to be the last one, yet I see a whole lot of little woolly ones marching straight over the hill to where the horizon would be if we could ever catch it, make it spit out its name. Oh it can be horrible out there sometimes. Then ...”

“... Opposite the title-page of Mr Baker’s skeletonised but substantially accurate account of John Anderson’s philosophy there stand two epigraphs. They are both from Heraclitus or, more precisely, from Burnet’s translation of that enigmatic philosopher. The first of them is ontological: ‘The world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures kindling and measures going out ...”

“... some prescient fellow writers, notably Hugh MacDiarmid and H.G. Wells, had marked him as a major talent. Say ‘Scotland’ and few people (and no travel agents) will think of the bleak, windswept, comparatively featureless North-Eastern coastal region that separates St Andrews from Aberdeen. The Mearns is not a beauty spot and has no glamorous ...”

“... athletes in white flannels. Even the commentators are pros (some of them, like Cliff Drysdale and John McEnroe, excellent ones). In nearly every way tennis has become an alienated, albeit highly lucrative profession rather than a sport. The game’s most flamboyant and most gifted practitioner, Andre Agassi, has earned fabulous sums as an endorser of various ...”

“... accentuate this menace would be a world recession deep enough to render the (similarly overarmed) major powers of the capitalist world equivalently detested by the bulk of their citizenry. If it illuminates any political process at all, the idea of political messianism illuminates the internal political dynamics of revolution. Revolutions have made much of ...”

“... The dominant ideas were principally extracted from the pontifical utterances of ‘sages’, in John Holloway’s expression, like Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Bagehot, Froude, Huxley, Morley, Arnold. The team-written Wellesley Index project went on from this quest to anatomise the élite Victorian mind at a lower archaeological level than that of the pre-eminent ...”

“... family, after the takeover of the firm by Smith, Elder & Co (itself soon to be taken over by John Murray). A descendant – loyally named Richard Bentley – had lovingly conserved and catalogued them for posterity. In 1967, the BL acquired a tranche of early Macmillan papers: Harold Macmillan, it seems, was keen that the family firm’s archive should ...”

“... things Christians and others have believed about life after death. Thumbnail sketches of major figures lead into potted accounts of their hopes and fears of heaven: ‘As is well-known, Augustine (354-430) did not start his life as a saint’; ‘Newton wrote extensively on alchemy, theology and sacred chronology, though he published very little in ...”

“... be rewarded for their party’s consistent hostility to Brexit, but this will take time and some major crisis. Until then, opposition parties are probably best advised to concentrate on building a reputation for competence on other matters.If sovereignty means anything, it means taking responsibility for national policy. In this sense too, there is now ...”

“... friends she had than secret yellows on a wasp, ghosting the popular tune. The shouts of a sergeant-major wheel the regiment. What are the thoughts of a serving man? Tender? Insolent? Their black trousers are striped with gold. (iii) Here is the man in the stovepipe hat who is writing this poem. Surreptitiously, a pouch of verses round his neck, he has joined ...”

“... interventions at the recent Conservative Party Conference by Norman Tebbit. Although most of his major works are out of print, Carlyle’s letters, and those of his wife Jane, are in the process of being edited and published. It is a massive task, but they are among the finest literary letters of the century and the Carlyle archive (largely preserved in the ...”

“... for a handful, in the House of Commons. Lord Gilmour admits that Thatcherism with a human face (John Major) is still Thatcherism. He is more reluctant to admit that the reason the Government is still Thatcherite is that the Conservative Party is largely Thatcherite. If he accepted that he might be able to explain the failure of the Wets more ...”

“... Bentham had no great influence with the Establishment, and his mild criticism of the reformer Major Cartwright, who since the American Declaration of Independence had stumped about the country founding Hampden Clubs, as an example of ‘men with one idea’. Hazlitt shrewdly perceived the good Major, however much he ...”