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“... from outside Parliament, continuing the practice of his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, who appointed David Cameron as foreign secretary last November, making him a peer in order to do so. Many find the practice of making outside appointments constitutionally suspect. However, the constitutional issue that requires rectification isn’t so much the way in which ...”

“... was fashionable: ‘foxes were persuaded to run over narrow slings of webbing of which one end was held by a gentleman, the other by a lady. The “players” tossed the fox as it walked the tightrope – a good toss being up to twenty-four feet high. Augustus the Strong of Saxony was an enthusiastic fox-tosser and is reputed to have tossed to death some 687 ...”

“... It would be an exaggeration to say that when David Hume, at the age of 26, came back to London after his retreat at La Flèche, he had already thought all the thoughts he was going to think. On the other hand, there is a sense in which the famous Hume, who lived among the learned and judicious in Edinburgh so comfortably and, one might say, so smugly in his 18th-century way, was a superfluity ...”

“... and entertaining contributions. Hugh Trevor-Roper discusses the origins of Scottish kitsch; David Cannadine the (not at all remote) origins of British royal ritual; other contributions concern British rule in India and Welsh cultural identity (treated more respectfully than Trevor-Roper treats poor old Scotland). Eric Hobsbawm both introduces and ...”

“... manifesto that came to be known as the Limehouse Declaration. When Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and I met together that morning, we were clear in our intention: in breaking the mould of contemporary politics, we would create a new radical centre, push the Labour Party into third place, change the electoral system and usher in an era of ...”

“... should consider the sentence of hard labour that is the summer/autumn literary festival circuit. David Starkey – to take an almost random example – is talking about his bestselling Life of Elizabeth I not only at the Rye Festival this month (his session’s already sold out, I’m afraid), but at the Ilkley Literature Festival on 7 October, the ...”

“... construed as a spectacular failure – more promise than performance. Gallipoli, 1915, was still held against him; since 1929 he had been railing in the wilderness – sometimes presciently, as on Germany, sometimes ludicrously, as in support of the King over abdication – without getting back into office. From young man in a hurry to old codger going ...”

“... old Royal Naval Dockyard, once home to warships. Last summer the America’s Cup yacht race was held here and the billion-dollar computerised man-powered sailing machines tried to outmanoeuvre each other over a course laid out in the Great Sound. While this was going on something infinitely more important was continuing at the other end of the island and I ...”

“... to be in some manner allegories of the Cold War. Aesthetic, commercial and cultural contexts are held in solution, with exactly what aim is not always clear. In a few cases the specimens offer a diagnosis of the world they spring from. The book closes with an account of Kazan and Schulberg’s A Face in the Crowd: an instructive parable, Hoberman ...”

“... tend to be more immoral than individuals.’ For King himself, according to his biographer David Garrow, Moral Man and Immoral Society was an early and crucial influence. It turned him away from the social-gospel Christianity which looked on war as a unique enemy of progress; Niebuhr, by contrast, taught that war was only one manifestation of that ...”

“... Wellington (her pen as mighty as his sword); Gash’s Peel (a peerless study of a baronet); Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne (one patrician beguilingly evoking another); Blake’s Disraeli (champagne and epigrams all the way); and Marquand’s MacDonald (Fame is the spur stood on its head). But many prime ministers have fared less well: Chatham and Lord John ...”

“... Mullan finds plenty of evidence to support this contention. His argument thus reinforces the long-held assumption that Dickens, unlike Eliot, say, or James, wasn’t very good at representing the ‘inner life’. Mullan makes a virtue of a supposed vice. By breaking the rules of literary description, he concludes, Dickens’s fantastic analogies added ‘new ...”

“... in a hopeless seat, then the safe Labour seat of Blackburn, which he inherited from Castle and has held since 1979. He has been a very successful local MP in a seat which is now about 2o per cent Muslim, and his account of his relations with the Muslim community is one of the most interesting parts of the book. His political progression was not entirely ...”

“... David Fincher’s The Social Network, which tells the story of Facebook, is fast and intelligent and mean, a sort of screwball comedy without the laughs. It’s written by Aaron Sorkin, whose credits include The West Wing and A Few Good Men, and based on a novelised history by Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires ...”

“... to attention following a remarkable exhibition of Dutch painting, ‘Gods, Saints and Heroes’, held last year in Washington, Detroit and Amsterdam. To the outsider (who does not read Dutch) there appears to be quite extraordinarily little external evidence with which to support this new interpretation. Contemporary inventories and nearly contemporary ...”