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“... get what you pay for. Each concept has acquired constitutional legitimacy in its time – for, as John Griffith famously observed, the constitution is what happens. So when you pick up The New British Constitution and ask what new constitution that might be, one answer is that the British constitution, because it is always changing, is always new. But the ...”

“... and, simultaneously, the man who was Traven first moved tentatively out of the shadows. When John Huston set about filming The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1946, he woke one morning to see a small man standing in his Mexican hotel room, offering a card which introduced him as Hal Croves, Traven’s trusted agent. Croves worked for Huston as an ...”

“... a continuing record of high individual success: Tom, the pioneer in the discovery of photography; John the founder of the Royal Horticultural Society; and Josiah II, the head of a great family firm secure in the knowledge of its acknowledged fame and industrial leadership. All of these claimed achievements have something of a hollow ring when examined more ...”

“... from which it has emanated’. He extended his evolutionism into ethics and religion in his last major book, Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, of 1932, where, for example, he compares two forms of morality: a morality of ‘pressure’, or social obligation, which is more or less static, is founded on habit or dumb acceptance of its rules and ...”

“... of New Labour. Every other country in the European Union, the ten prospective new entrants and major members of the Commonwealth such as India and Australia have written constitutions which define clearly and precisely the balance of power between the legislature, executive and judiciary. At a time when it has never been easier for the state to act ...”

“... as Kushner notes – lends itself to biography, which is why there have been at least two major ones in recent years: the pedestrian Life with Monte Cristo by Arthur and Barbara Gelb and Louis Sheaffer’s masterly Pulitzer Prize-winning two-volume account, O’Neill: Son and Playwright and O’Neill: Son and Artist. (Dowling’s biography frequently ...”

“... households; it is unequal, with a high Gini coefficient by European standards, and major disparities in health outcomes between classes and ethnicities; and it is a travel hub, with 23.7 million international arrivals in the first three months of 2020. In other words, the UK is crowded, old, fat, cramped, unequal and much visited, and all of ...”

“... some good minor characters. Oakes worked on the Army newspaper, the Union Jack, edited by a Major Tarrant who had such a deep reverence for royalty that any king or queen mentioned in its pages had to be given the prefix HM. Defending this typographical clumsiness, Tarrant declared: ‘The world may be going to the bow-wows, but as long as I’m here we ...”

“... The story of the burning of the Greatest Library of the Ancient World by the Arabs is well known: John the Grammarian, a Coptic priest living in Alexandria at the time of the Arab conquest in 641 AD, came to know ‘Amr, the Muslim general who conquered the city. The men were each other’s intellectual peers, and John became the Emir’s trusted adviser ...”

“... newspapers.* Last summer? Well, that problem was solved last week when the Gospel according to St John, all 1300 pages of it, beat the dust out of the doormat. It is a sure sign that spring is in the air when Wisden arrives. While there is a good twelve months browse therein, one flick through is enough to stir the brain cells. It is the cricketer’s holy ...”

“... with contempt: we have been told lies and our house agreement (guaranteeing negotiations over any major change in working conditions) has been flagrantly violated. He is as sick of the printers as anyone else, and as eager to make use of the new technology: but if we go down to Wapping tomorrow with £2000 in our pockets – simply to help Rupert Murdoch ...”

“... chosen to swim against what my hunch as a literary historian tells me will prove to have been the major tide of poetry in this century. That broad tide is represented by the Modernist movement. Open form, the aggregation of numinous fragments without logical or narrative structure, the movement of spoken rather than written language, incompleteness of ...”

“... One of this book’s chief virtues is candour. If John Cummins first saw Drake as the knightly figure sans peur et sans reproche who had been held up for admiration to so many generations, it must have grieved him to find how far upwards the feet of clay could reach. But he states the facts with a fine impartiality ...”

“... largest amphibious assault force that had ever been assembled, failed disastrously in its first major offensive, an attempt to capture Cartagena. After weeks of siege, about ten thousand of his men had perished, mostly of yellow fever, malaria and dysentery. Almost as many again had been injured in battle. Vernon retreated, and the naval war in the Americas ...”

“... Richard Perceval Graves. It takes over where the author’s father, Robert’s younger brother John Graves, left off. John, who died in 1980, had been described by Robert as a ‘typically good pupil of a typically good school’ (to which he returned as teacher); he had for long contemplated the composition of a book ...”