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“... crystal-ball job or a set of optimistic exhortations, and volumes on the two Parliamentary chambers have been either self-congratulatory or merely descriptive accounts of unsatisfactory procedures and bad habits. In that short time the landscape has been changed not only by a general election but by Nolan. Some years ago I sat in embarrassment at an ...”

“... been no comparable drawing power among groups whose European populations were not sent to the gas chambers. That is, the descendents of Swedish, Italian, French, Russian, German, Greek, Polish, Korean, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, all present in huge numbers in the United States, also fairly quickly lost their languages. (The only great exceptions here ...”

“... for granted elsewhere. They order these things somewhat better in the Council of Europe, where Stephen Mennell, a disciple of Norbert Elias, began work on All Manners of Food. The slow-baked book that has finally emerged reads like a series of essays on pertinent food topics in cultural history rather than a comprehensive account of what has been ...”

“... his cast of mind was playful and the Fifties were a time to exercise it, when everyone was reading Stephen Potter’s Gamesmanship and Lifemanship, books that treated life as a comic contest for which people devised or divined concealed rules. It was the decade, too, of what one might call ludic taxonomy. From Arthur Koestler’s 1942 essay we learnt to divide ...”

“... home on the bus. His girlfriend’s father, a metalwork teacher, helped out with the engine chambers; the fuel injectors were made from the little plastic tubes inside biros. When Scott-Scott went for his interview at the Armstrong Siddeley Rocket Department a few years later, they worried that there’d been a security leak. The contract for Black ...”

“... by contrast, they were organised along status group rather than territorial lines, with separate chambers for each order or ‘estate’. Such assemblies were structurally much weaker and unable to prevent absolutism. The second factor I have already mentioned: the timing of states’ initial encounters with sustained geopolitical competition. On Ertman’s ...”

“... notably the ‘QAnon shaman’, Jake Angeli, a tattooed, shirtless man who strutted through the chambers of the Capitol with horns on his head and red, white and blue paint on his face. And then there were the neo-Nazis, white supremacists and militia members, the ‘fine people’ of Charlottesville. For all their shouts of ‘USA, USA,’ they represented ...”

“... for her disdainful self-righteousness; she ‘cruelly victimised’ her hapless rival, Jessie Chambers; and so the character-assassination goes on. Meyers portrays Lydia as a toxic personality; and because she set out to dominate everyone around her, it was only rough justice when her husband ‘physically dominated’ her in return. But what does ...”

“... root & flourish in [his] own time’. More than that, he was liked. Among scientists perhaps only Stephen Hawking has given his admirers such a strong feeling that they knew him personally. Strangers wrote with random queries, such as why do pigeons fly in circles, and anecdotes of animal behaviour: R.M. Middleton of West Hartlepool explained how he had ...”

“... and mass killings. Yet it still gives me an eerie feeling to read about people like George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Raymond Aron, to say nothing of less admirable characters of the Melvin Lasky stripe, taking part in surreptitiously subsidised anti-Communist ventures – magazines, symphony orchestras, art exhibitions – or in the setting up of foundations ...”

“... 1716 coincided almost exactly with the early stirrings of the landscape movement. A year earlier, Stephen Switzer, one of the first promoters of the picturesque style, published The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation and when Brown was three, Alexander Pope, who believed that ‘all gardening is landscape painting,’ began work on the house and ...”

“... about ‘the Welsh prince, long believed by his countrymen to have discovered America in 1170’ (Chambers Biographical Dictionary). Muldoon’s ‘Madoc’ is thus a ‘remake’ – a notion that crops up in the opening prose poem in the collection. The title is from Southey, the principal character is Coleridge, and the prevailing spirit is not unlike that ...”

“... selection, the latest in a series of Prion Humour Classics which includes Saki’s contemporaries Stephen Leacock, Jerome K. Jerome and the Grossmiths. Saki lends a caustic distinction to that company. His real name was Hector Hugh Munro and he was born in Burma in 1870, the son of an inspector-general of the Burma police. Two years later his mother died ...”

“... first sustained scholarly attempt on its subject since the books written by Edgar Fripp and E.K. Chambers in the Twenties. Its very existence is the symptom of a quiet renaissance in a branch of Shakespeare studies which for much of this century has languished in intellectual disrepute. Just as the Birthday celebrations seem to preserve echoes of Empire Day ...”

“... a spy is arrested’ was set up in type but never printed: the Westminster’s editor, Stephen Spender’s uncle, was mildly pro-German in 1912, and he also turned down a piece called ‘In Fortified Germany’. But the third and fourth articles made it – Lawrence’s debut as a travel writer – and they already exhibit their author’s hedgehog ...”