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“... meetings were hugely popular during their visits to Britain in the 1870s and 1880s, leading David Bebbington to make the startling claim that ‘Moody and Sankey probably represent the chief cultural influence of the United States on Britain during the 19th century.’ Of course, if one really took seriously the criterion about having ‘in some way ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David Marquand, who was at Magdalen and who told me how he had been scared out of his wits one dark night in the cloisters when Bruce had swept past him in his Spanish cloak. I must have written to him and been told to come down to Magdalen, though I remember ...”

“... Everywhere is palpably Edwardian and Arts and Crafts including a relief of a peacock by Burne-Jones. A film about the First War could begin here, the whole place redolent of the dead and particularly the illustrious dead. And, yes, there are memorials to the men of the village and others round about, but it is these famously unfulfilled dead of the Lost ...”

“... normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of decades, the ...”

“... the same from one abbey to the next.2 April, Yorkshire. Come across a thirty-year-old note from David Vaisey, at that time a postgraduate student at Bodley and subsequently its Librarian. The note just has a crudely drawn swastika and the slogan ‘A.L. Raus’.14 April. Pass two slightly cheeky-looking middle-aged businessmen in Hanover Square, one of whom ...”

“... maternal grandfather, whose name was Mendel Seidel, that all Americans were named Brown, Smith or Jones, so he told the immigration officer at Ellis Island that his name was Mendel Brown. Perhaps these surnames did not really mean very much to him: he presumably thought of himself as Mendel ben Avraham. In the same vein, my paternal grandfather probably told ...”

“... offered a positive defence of capitalism, calling for a return to the ‘English’ liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith – ‘the older liberalism’, as he called it, which was never ashamed of its links to ‘classical free-trade doctrine’. Mises admired English culture (and was happy to let it annex the Scotland of Hume and Smith) but he went on to ...”

“... extremely popular. And if political correctness is seen as strongly bound to Labour, the Lib Dems, David Cameron, the EU, the BBC, the Guardian and, in Grimsby, Melanie Onn, the movement against it is strongly connected to Ukip, Jeremy Clarkson, the Daily Mail and, in Grimsby, Austin Mitchell.Before he stood aside, there was speculation Mitchell would be the ...”

“... I miss the atlas I really wanted and come away with one or two biographies, including a memoir of David Winn, an Etonian contemporary of Francis who also died young. 26 August. Do not renew my subscription to the Friends of Regents Park, one of whose aims seems to be to enforce the regulations against cycling in the Park. Ten years ago A. was fined £25 for ...”

“... of Scottish post-Union society, Jacques Leruez’s L’ Ecosse: une nation sans état (1983) and David McCrone’s Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (1992). He gives a more political twist to these important analyses, attempting what amounts to a general ideological reassessment of post-1707 history: ‘In effect, if not in ...”

“... a tree in Hyde Park, one leg on either side, and so not unreminiscent of the predicament Corporal Jones is always getting himself into in Dad’s Army. If the resulting photograph is rather strained it’s hardly surprising.6 May. I am waiting downstairs while Rupert puts the finishing touches to himself before we go out. It’s an ancestral scene, as Dad was ...”

“... is, however, a step too far for some otherwise sympathetic scientists. As the geneticist Steve Jones put it, Darwin Year has encouraged ‘vulgar Darwinists’ in their already souped up tendency misleadingly to treat evolutionary biology as ‘a universal solvent that can sort out the most recalcitrant problems of ...”