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“... done for Britain,’ he said. ‘We didn’t like the cut of their jib.’ Goldsmith was a close Heath supporter, a right-wing Tory, and he and Wilson had known each other for only a short while. By the time the honours list was leaked, Goldsmith’s war against the Eye was backfiring, and his public image, not just in Fleet Street, was hurt, mostly, as he ...”

“... That is the basis of Steel’s strategy. After the General Election of February 1974 Edward Heath, faced with the prospect of heading a minority government, discussed with the then Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe the possibility of some sort of coalition. But Steel reports that it was ‘the almost universal opinion’ of Liberal MPs that no such offer ...”

“... scenes occur in the great mining films of the early 1940s (Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). Bernard soon leaves the mineshafts behind. His main interest lies in the ways in which the advent of the elevator transformed the design, construction and experience of high-rise buildings, and thus of modern urban life in ...”

“... mansion. In 1937, Goldfinger designed a terrace of three houses on Willow Road, facing Hampstead Heath. The central house was for his own family: it was flat-roofed and concrete-framed, and replaced some derelict cottages. Local opposition, orchestrated by the future Conservative home secretary, Henry Brooke, was fierce. Goldfinger – assisted by such ...”

“... introduced himself and his two colleagues of the tribunal, Justices William Hoyt of Canada and John Toohey of New South Wales, the last a member of a well-known Catholic family of lawyers, journalists and brewers. All three wore business suits and asked occasional sharp questions. Behind the bench loomed the ninety-odd volumes of Widgery Tribunal ...”

“... the lives of working-class pensioners. Had it reached the statute book, even the Mark One Heath government (the one pledged to a paler version of what we now know as Thatcherism) would not have dared repeal it. But it was washed down the plughole of history by Wilson’s decision to go to the country almost a year early, leading to Labour’s shock ...”

“... in British industry were structural and originated in the Industrial Revolution itself. This was a Heath Robinson affair, with laissez-faire giving rise to a ramshackle form of capitalism swiftly overtaken by other countries. So much for self-help! From this angle, Barnett is no Thatcherite: he does not suppose that a return to laissez-faire in 1945 would have ...”

“... elected governments can be defeated, or even overthrown, by extra-parliamentary producer groups. John Stuart Mill’s conception of representative government has not lost its inspirational force, but the participatory, libertarian values underlying it run counter to the ethos of the modern centralist state, and the questions it raises are subversive, not ...”

“... other for forty years. We are gentlemen, so we say what we think. If I had been talking to Ted Heath, I would have been more polite.’ As Lewis remarks, this is reminiscent of the Gerald Brenan character who claimed that the great advantage of being born a gentleman was that one need never behave like one. It was no good: Macmillan wouldn’t have Butler ...”

“... camp. Bar-Or said he had, though of course there was also ‘the well-known book by Dr John Adler’: ‘This is the outstanding book about Theresienstadt, and it is called Theresienstadt.’ judge halevi: Was he there? state prosecutor bar-or: He himself was in Theresienstadt. I simply hesitate to burden the court with material. This is an ...”

“... champagne and brandy . . . to incapacitate any lesser man’, as his private secretary John Colville put it. He would talk to ministers with Toby, his budgie, alighting (and sometimes doing more than that) on their heads. He had frequent sleeps. His method of dealing with crises, he explained, was to ‘turn out the light, say “bugger ...”

“... the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ of the ...”

“... nature is as much a political metaphor, an instrument for national contestation, as it is for John Clare and Ted Hughes. Critics such as Tom Paulin and Mina Gorji have drawn our attention to the ways in which nature becomes a metaphor for an embattled Englishness in Clare and Hughes; the unfinished ‘naturalness’ of nature is conflated with the ...”

“... half-whisper that someone called Colm Tóibín was in the library looking at the correspondence of John Butler Yeats, which had been transcribed, then typed, then donated to the library by William M. Murphy, John Butler Yeats’s biographer. And now I looked up from the Yeats letters to find a man looking at me. It struck me ...”

“... for ‘When will my people be free?’‘For Scots with mixed [English and Scottish] parentage,’ John Lloyd wrote in the Financial Times in 2012, ‘a forced choice is uncomfortable. Should we, on the model of American blacks, claim “blackness” – or in this case Scottishness – as our dominant identity?’ Lloyd was not alone in feeling that his ...”