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“... Why, Bailyn asked, had America not become Canada? More unsettling still was Bailyn’s tour de force, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1975), in which he reconstructed the early stages of the American Revolution through the eyes of Tory loyalists. Wood too, in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), emphasised the abrupt discontinuity of the ...”

“... thoughts of Johnson, relieved that Kennedy has been assassinated in Florida: ‘Imagine if he’d been killed in Texas. I’d be suspect number one.’ Although several novelists have used the Kennedy assassination as a means of exploring the underside of American society, assassination fiction remains a variant of the ...”

“... Until​ our recent discontents England had never succumbed to doctrinal nationalism. Absent from English history was the obsessiveness found in many countries across Europe about the recovery of authentic nationhood. Although the English have often been perturbed about the condition of England, they have rarely floated nationalist solutions to their problems ...”

“... The​ issue of losers’ consent has come sharply into focus in recent decades, most obviously in the US presidential elections of 2000 and 2020, but also closer to home: how many Remainers immediately accepted the democratic verdict of the Brexit vote, and moved on? In Northern Irish politics a perverse variant of this phenomenon obtains: the problem of winners’ consent ...”

“... erase his tracks, we know less about him from his correspondence with friends and allies than we do from the observations of ‘his apoplectic adversaries’, not least Hutchinson, who is both a central source and protagonist here. Is Schiff also ventriloquising Hutchinson? She offers in passing several harsh remarks on Adams’s revolutionary activities and ...”

“... practical questions about when, after moments of rebellion or usurpation, it was proper to give de facto allegiance to a newly ‘settled’ government; and historical arguments about the preservation of the ancient English constitution. The term ‘contract’ did surface in political usage, but not in the Lockean sense; it was more often used in ...”

“... far from a dystopia. Rather, vice ‘nursed ingenuity’ in every quarter, and ‘Luxury/Employ’d a million of the poor.’ Fickleness and fashion in diet, furniture and dress constitute ‘the very wheel that turn’d the trade’. No profession, calling or craft, including medicine and the Church, ‘was without ...”

“... From the earliest days of the republic the practice has been for congressional tellers to do the counting, with the vice president little more than a master of ceremonies. An election, Lessig and Seligman insist, ‘cannot be reversed by the unilateral action of the vice president’.The purported vice-presidential powers over the count went ...”

“... of justice, ‘the promotion of mediocrity’ and ‘marital break-ups’: why, the cover asks, ‘do so many husbands don an apron at the lodge when they wouldn’t be seen dead in one at home?’ British fears of Masonic conspiracy have never risen to the same pitch as on the Continent or in the United States, not least because our history lacks an ...”

“... wholeheartedly pursue, and that was always, it seems, up for negotiation. Did IRA volunteers do time in jail, did their comrades die, in combat or in hunger strikes, for the compromise deal that was at the forefront of IRA strategy for three decades from the early 1970s?Others beyond the IRA leadership also bore responsibility for the continuing ...”

“... insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January 2021, the United States experienced a less obtrusive coup d’état: the hustled retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, the oldest of the three remaining liberals on the Supreme Court. The prematurely leaked announcement in late January took Breyer himself by surprise. But the leak wasn’t any more of a breach of ...”

“... gives space to the voices of British Americans disillusioned with the so-called patriot cause. Dr Sylvester Gardiner, for instance, in a letter to his son-in-law, contrasted the benign governance of the colonies under British rule with the mob rule he encountered in Boston: ‘I don’t believe there ever was a people in any age or part of the world that ...”

“... high culture. Pocock – perhaps alone among early modern British historians – is also able to do justice to Gibbon’s global vision. Indeed, the central thesis – among the many compelling ideas to be found in Barbarism and Religion – involves a major recasting of the celebrated historian of the Latin West as an unexpected historian of a Eurasian ...”

“... Among the intellectual figures who have shaped the modern world Adam Smith stands out as someone who doesn’t frighten the laity, might be positively welcomed indeed by middle England. Should the neighbours catch a glimpse of the Wealth of Nations sitting on the bookshelf alongside Thatcher’s memoirs or the latest Delia Smith, there’s no risk of ostracism ...”

“... Reform Select Committee of the House of Commons issued a report in March last year titled Do We Need a Constitutional Convention for the UK? The Liberal Democrats’ Home Rule and Community Rule Commission has advocated ‘home rule all round’ in a new federal union. A similar call has come from David Melding, the Conservative deputy presiding ...”