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“... divide. The Blackwood set were Tories in a city run by Whigs. To harry the Whig establishment that held Scottish public life in its somnolent grasp: this was the paper’s political mission. If the northern stronghold of ‘whiggery and infidelity’ was the Edinburgh Review, then Blackwood’s would muster its forces under the ‘twin banners of sound ...”

“... that draw on the Bible. Joseph Heller’s God Knows sets itself up as the memoir of the ageing David – ‘warrior king, the sweet psalmist of Israel’ – and plays off its contemporary idiom against an ancient story for cheap laughs. David reminisces without ever losing a sense of his audience; with a wink to the ...”

“... had to do with public affairs, was misplaced. The landed aristocracy regained its ascendancy and held it through most of the 19th century at the moderate cost of persuading middle-class voters and administrators to act in its interests. For a short span of years it had looked as if great changes might occur. In earlier periods of such fluidity permanent ...”

“... more extreme. The charitable impulses of Dorchester’s citizens were, at the same time, stirred. David Underdown has discovered in Dorchester an outpouring of philanthropy on an extraordinary scale, unrivalled in England. Here was a town of only 2500 inhabitants which gave, in the fight for Christ against Antichrist, £150 for the defence of their ...”

“... It made me wonder, as I’ll say later, whether we might not have to rethink much of what we’ve held dear about language for thirty-odd years. Why should it matter whether Sign is held to be a language? The consequences for a child of ordinary intelligence, born very deaf, are incalculable. In the past, only the most ...”

“... true, for some are contradictory to others. And they stand in contrast to another group of beliefs held on the whole by the young – concerning the special Scottish contribution to bawdy songs, drunken conviviality, early class consciousness, hardiness and poverty. Items from both sets of belief contribute directly or by opposition to the subject-matter of ...”

“... workshop of the world’ and the supposedly pacific attitudes of its burgeoning middle classes held much greater sway. But the British of the 1850s were just as worked up about the French as their grandfathers had been. Bands of Volunteers formed themselves all over the place with hardly any official encouragement or subsidy – and somewhat to the ...”

“... politics, then? Not exactly. ‘He was his party’s most fertile ideas man at Westminster since David Lloyd George, perhaps since Gladstone,’ Barberis blurts out in his final section, almost as though he has just thought of it, reassuring himself by adding: ‘That is what he was – an ideas man, not a political philosopher or even the careful crafter of ...”

“... before the Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars, they have now made things even with David Daniell’s William Tyndale. Tyndale’s life is soon told. He was born, probably in 1494, of a landowning and entrepreneurial family in that part of Gloucestershire where the Cotswolds meet the Severn, since then the home of Evelyn Waugh (temporarily: the ...”

“... omertà – I’ll probably be sad about that too.The nub of it is this. Kate Forbes has sincerely held but unpopular views that elevate an ideal of how to live that is antithetical to the liberty of many of her fellow citizens. Some of these views derive from contested interpretations of the Bible that are held by Free ...”

“... sidelined because they can’t be trusted to get their sums right, or are they simply being held at arm’s length until it’s safe to let them loose again? Hayek argued that he was only ever trying to preserve democracy: that is, preserve it from its own worst instincts. But in doing so he ended up treating it like one of those precious renewables ...”

“... to the welfare bill. Given their commitment to protect pensioner benefits, tax credits – despite David Cameron’s earlier promise not to cut them – were pushed to the front of the queue, and in the July budget Osborne announced that tax credits would be cut by £4.4 billion. This amounted to 15 per cent of the total tax credit budget, and meant that more ...”

“... portrays solid reliability in her (yellow?) calf-length coat and peaked cap, her lollipop sign held upside-down at her side. The Bus Conductress and Postman, taken in 1977, might have stepped out of Sander’s taxonomy, People of the 20th Century, were it not for their local insignia. Henri Cartier-Bresson, for the purposes of this exhibition, is cast as a ...”

“... the same term to the ritual obscenities of bottle-throwing soccer fans somehow seems misplaced. David Riches is aware of this incongruity. His symposium contains 11 papers by 11 different authors drawn from the Proceedings of an ESRC-funded conference held at St Andrews University in January 1985. The violence under ...”

“... right words, I will never know, because he knows what I do not, how to keep things to himself. David Sedaris had invited me to read alongside him that night at UCLA, but before that we had the whole day. We took a cab first to Venice Beach, so that Jason could pay homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘Remember when he says that he feels the pump and it’s ...”