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“... Besides, devolution was bequeathed by Old Labour to Blair as a way of holding off Scottish and Welsh nationalism, not because it was desirable in itself.Still, it happened and the Conservatives opposed it. Under Thatcher and Major the Conservative Party’s constitutional record was lamentable: neither devolution nor the restoration of London local ...”

“... at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself. Wary Bolshevik officials summoned the newly appointed British ...”

“... in the existence of ‘British nationalism’. The constitutional and cultural muddle of English, Welsh, Scottish and Cornish Britishness lies behind the assertive front of unionism. It is as though Deane wants to deny the evolved legitimacy of the 26-county state and the varieties of Irishness within it. Many land borders in Europe have moved and will move ...”

“... West and Ecclesiastes) is given a round of applause. The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish waiter.’ Waiting at the lights this afternoon my bike slips out of my hands and slides to ...”

“... strategy. The chief writer and executive producer on the new Doctor Who is Russell T. Davies, the Welsh writer previously known for Queer as Folk (1999), Channel 4’s energetic, unusually active drama about young gay men in Manchester, and for the view, as expressed to a journalist, that the motor of all narrative is sex. Before that, however, Davies had a ...”

“... not quite know what to do with them. The illustration on the front cover is by a Scottish artist, David Wilkie. John Rennie makes an appearance as one of ‘the most iconic figures of the age’. Thomas Chalmers features as the ‘spiritual guide’ of the Liberal Tories. Adam Smith, of course, is ‘central’. Mechanics institutes open first in Glasgow, and ...”

“... clustered in slum districts, like the area of Merthyr Tydfil that outsiders called ‘a sort of Welsh Alsatia’. Sometimes they resorted to the workhouse casual ward, though in the later 19th century that generally meant a day’s forced labour to ‘earn’ their hard resting place and meagre provisions. According to the journalist Henry Mayhew, many ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... the doings of the vulgar:   So Ianthe’s day passed, punctuated by cups of tea and a lunch of welsh rarebit and trifle at a café run by gentlewomen. It was not much different from other days. At five minutes to five, Shirley, the typist who had been helping Ianthe to file some cards, covered up her typewriter, put on the black imitation leather coat she ...”

“... John Hannon in a journal extract published in the Bristol magazine, Entropy. (Hannon describes how David Jay Brown and John Lilly in Mavericks of the Mind ‘discuss the notion that ketamine renders the brain directly susceptible to TV transmissions.’ And goes on that ‘Lilly even claims that he once found himself inside a TV soap opera while on ...”

“... landscapes, but his work had none of the damp, green, memory-sodden melancholy of the English and Welsh valleys. The light in them was sharp, reflected off the Aegean; his palette in paintings such as Landscape, Hydra (1960-62) shimmers. The figures in these vivid landscapes were seldom single: they were local people, often the sailors who were his on-off ...”

“... government to Scotland and Wales (following the referendums, a separate Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly were established), the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights in the UK law (through the adoption of the Human Rights Act, in 1998), the freedom of information legislation, and the reform of the Parliament. If you forgive the ...”

“... the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered the secret world ‘in the spirit of John Buchan and left it in the spirit of Kafka’; allowing for quite a lot of exaggeration at both ends, it’s a reasonable comment on The Spy who Came in from the ...”

“... disseminated in England’ or what ‘comes from, or bears upon, England’. Scottish, Irish and Welsh authors are excluded; and only those inhabitants of the former colonies who lived in or wrote about England can be included. (Oxford’s guidelines would have turned its own properly capacious Companion to English Literature into a mouse-eaten cheese.) So ...”

“... weight was crushing even for the very finest of its mandarins. The senior Foreign Office official, David Gore-Booth, agreed that answers ‘should be accurate’ but thought that ‘half a picture can be accurate.’ Similarly, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, thought that it was ‘acceptable in some circumstances for a statement to disclose only part ...”