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“... to India. For once, Wells wasn’t dogging him: but there was Maurice Baring’s C, Ford’s Some do not, Masefield’s Sard Harker, Mottram’s The Spanish Farm, plus various dangerous floaters like The Constant Nymph, The Inimitable Jeeves and even (if it was to be a year for the booksellers) Mary Webb’s Precious Bane.Still, the mistake, then as now, is ...”

“... are much worse. Perhaps one day there will be a truly benevolent (Labour) government which will do what needs to be done. Social policy is more often than not bureaucracy plus good will. It is a nice combination. Indeed, if one thinks of the people whose supplementary benefits barely get them above the poverty line, or those who could not survive if they ...”

“... the origins of the Labour Party, entwined with the achievements of Keir Hardie and Ramsay McDonald, and appraising the fate of the New Liberalism, as it unfolded in the era of Asquith and Lloyd George, had served to open their minds to the historic frailty as well as the inherent strength of Labour’s position. In looking at the displacement of the ...”

“... is a half-baked meal that would leave us more malnourished than ever. Its enactment would do little to protect freedom for ordinary people. It would make our nation’s rulers evenless accountable and representative than they are at present. It would make next to impossible any radical egalitarian change of our society. What it would lead to would be ...”

“... his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost circle of the school’. However, as Peter Campbell wrote in the LRB (3 February 2011), English painters ‘responded to Impressionism’s escape from the academic into the everyday, but made something tighter and darker of it. The French pleasure in picnics and river parties and weather wasn’t ...”

“... chapters on Brexit, and especially on antisemitism, moves in the other direction: in attempting to do scrupulous justice to his interviewees, he sometimes leaves us unclear whom to believe – but then Procopius didn’t have to worry about defamation suits.Neither book offers an extended reflection on the power of the press. It’s possible that Jones omitted ...”

“... China and the US. In the early 1990s, Beijing sent officials to be trained in Singapore, but Peter Sloterdijk’s line that statues of Mao will one day be replaced with ones of LKY now seems a dated exuberance. The meritocratic ideology of Singapore has begun to show signs of wear, and its elite seems incapable of regenerating itself as that of the PRC ...”

“... Once in a while an Army lorry lumbered up Artillery Road: my first suicidal fantasy had to do with flinging myself under one in the presence of my horrified parents, now strangely reunited, as if by magic carpet, to witness the act. This, I know, makes it all sound bad: but Sir John Moore’s wasn’t really so awful – our teacher once took us out to ...”