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“... one, not least for the unexpected light it shines on India’s emergence as a nation state. Miles Taylor is better known as a historian of Chartism and Victorian radical politics generally, but this background comes in handy here, as he takes the queen out of court politics and into the popular arena, where she proves surprisingly at home. Throughout his ...”

“... sharing out the Baghdad railway. As late as 23 July, ten days before the outbreak of war, Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, actually said that the two great powers, England and Germany, were drawing closer together in friendship. I very much doubt whether the long-term estrangement between the two countries really counted for much. Though there was ...”

“... George Orwell is commonly invoked as the ideal role model for the intellectual: feisty, independent, outspoken and contrarian, active in the public sphere, and famous. So it’s a surprise to learn that the combined circulation of the three periodicals in which most of his essays appeared was only about half that of the publication you are now reading ...”

“... Hope and Glory’. Few even sang ‘England Arise’. England had risen all the same. Thus A.J.P. Taylor, in his English History 1914-1945, of 1965. Who can believe it now, either as an idea of England, or as a starting piece for a collection of English writings from the early 1950s? And who can even remember ‘England Arise’? Who recalls who wrote it, or ...”

“... already carry a whiff of nostalgia. But a new book co-authored by Richard Rastall and Andrew Taylor sheds some light on the ways they worked and lived. Rastall and Taylor begin by explaining what minstrels were (no simple task). The word comes from the Anglo-Norman menestral, which could refer to a travelling musician ...”

“... the pattern of the 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore, which broke the election deadlock by appointing George W. Bush president. It is a desperate ploy; and it could work. Trump told Zelensky the US had been very good to Ukraine, and it would be nice if he got a ‘favour’ in return – Roy Cohn’s mother taught Roy the concept of ‘the favour bank’ and it ...”

“... In an article on Arthur Koestler written in 1944, George Orwell suggested that the lack of imaginative depth in English political fictions, when these are compared with works of European origin, may be due to the fact that the English simply lack any experience of the totalitarian state: ‘The special world created by secret-police forces, censorship of opinion, torture and frame-up trials is, of course, known about and to some extent disapproved of, but it has made very little emotional impact ...”

“... altogether. Such, no doubt, is how Christopher Hitchens will be remembered. The resemblances to George Orwell, on whom Hitchens has written so admiringly,* are obvious enough, though so are some key differences. Orwell was a kind of literary proletarian who lived in dire straits for most of his life, and began to earn serious money from his writing only ...”

“... seconds, before whipping out a revolver and shooting a suspiciously dark supporter in the George Fox Stand (since United fans are known colloquially as ‘Arabs’). This muddle of transdisciplinary pretentiousness comes from a book called Not Playing for Celtic: Another Paradise Lost, and, yes, the paradise in question is indeed John Milton’s ...”

“... Macaulay lasted four years and Maine six. India could provoke radicalism: take Annie Besant or George Orwell. Or it could harden conservatism. But liberal designs for India always sounded better in London than they did in Calcutta. Very few survived the long journey east. Gnarled, no-nonsense company colonels dominate Mount’s book. Their India has been ...”

“... to’, browbeating, placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other group. Robert Taylor’s close account of the TUC has in it some wonderfully revealing passages on these (and other) periods: none so rich as the gathering of 1 June 1969 at Chequers which brought together Wilson, his First (and Employment) Secretary Barbara Castle, Jack Jones ...”

“... and easy to manipulate, aren’t they? Are they? A generation ago, the historians E.J. Hobsbawm, George Rudé, and E.P. Thompson demonstrated that even rioting crowds are ‘not fickle, peculiarly irrational, or generally given to bloody attacks on persons’. Their conclusions have been confirmed by three decades of historical case-studies of violent crowds ...”

“... his 18th-century studies. Most central of all was the search for security and identity. Here, like George III, Namier was the mollusc in search of his rock. Just as his parents had rejected their Judaism, so Lewis rejected their Christianity. Just as his father had disinherited him of Koszylowce, the family estate, so he worked ceaselessly for a Jewish ...”

“... within which many political persuasions – from Clarendon, Hume and Macaulay to A.J.P. Taylor and E. P. Thompson – have helped an emerging nation make sense of itself. There are now good reasons, as Linda Colley and Chris Bayly have suggested, to bring the Empire to the centre of domestic history and to show how a wider world changed our ...”

“... three remarkable women of the century. But for another of her political companions of the 1880s, George Bernard Shaw, she was above all an actress. ‘She was successively a Puseyite Evangelical and Atheist Bible smasher, a Darwinian secularist, a Fabian socialist, a strike leader, and finally a Theosophist exactly as Mrs Siddons was a Lady Macbeth, Lady ...”