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“... enough of elites say the elites. It is time to remember where democracy came from and what it means. It is time to let the people as a whole decide. It is unfortunate, then, that a referendum has no more connection with where democracy came from than Giscard’s draft Constitution has with Thucydides’ History. ‘Referendum’ is a modern word – it ...”

“... Brown is not a born liar: he is, as we keep being reminded, a son of the manse, which, if it means anything, means that. But by not actually lying, Brown came across as something worse, a man who was happy to conceal the true state of his feelings. Because what was transparent, and what Cherie instantly picked up ...”

“... the corridor to get out. He then secured all three doors. Looking around I could see that my only means of escape was to throw myself out of the window behind his chair into the courtyard below.   ‘You are playing with dynamite. You’ll have to watch it,’ he said gravely.   ‘Oh yes, and who will detonate the dynamite, me or you, Michael,’ I ...”

“... and utterly trivial. It was a Hindenburg Line built to repel an army of one. Freud was by no means alone in emphasising the disproportion between stimulus and response. Most psychiatrists of the time regarded phobia as a perverse singling out, more or less at random, of an object or event to be afraid of. In the 1880s and 1890s, a favourite diversion ...”

“... of the proletariat’ – while insisting, on the other, that he would never use undemocratic means to achieve power. Birnbaum instead highlights a 1922 speech in which Blum criticised Soviet repression, calling it ‘one of the most impressive exposés of the logic of totalitarianism’, on a par with the work of Koestler and Solzhenitsyn. As for the ...”

“... ever written. Shaw argues that Ibsen’s great project is to counter idealism, by which he means the tendency to mask the shortcomings of institutions by pretending that they are perfect and celebrating them as such. In A Doll’s House, the idealised institution is marriage, the idealiser Torvald Helmer, and the ‘realist’ (Ibsen’s term for the ...”

“... enemy would always exceed any material damage thus inflicted, had taken firm root. Although by no means uncontested, it was to dominate military, political and popular opinion, and consequently the distribution of scarce resources, during the period between the world wars. It was generally agreed that the next world war would take the form of a ‘contest of ...”

“... all along, just not formally acknowledged. He ignores the copious constitutional arguments by means of which Americans, especially in the middle of the 20th century, kept alive the discussion of these matters. Instead, Lilla takes us from Hobbes through a series of canonical European philosophers up to and including Hegel. Then he provides an account of ...”

“... influence on the generations that followed. Following Osborne’s death in 1994, however, David Hare, among others, leaped to the playwright’s defence, in his memorial eulogy and a longer lecture first delivered in 2002 and repeated on the stage of the Royal Court on the 50th anniversary of Look Back in Anger’s opening. Now John Heilpern has taken ...”

“... ghetto to the gentry. But in practice, it is extremely difficult to establish what assimilation means, or to discover just how, when, why and where it happens. And where does that leave those many British Jews who refused, or were unable, to become Anglicised and acculturated? The assimilationists must regard them as ‘failures’, because they did not ...”

“... intérieures’ on every third floor. Luckhurst’s trenchant survey of social engineering by means of ‘corridic horizontality’ reaches its conclusion in the City of London, which boasts the Golden Lane Estate, constructed in the late 1950s with the Cité radieuse very much in mind; and, of course, the Barbican. Community – ‘universal ...”

“... before the levee at Holyrood, when he had worn ‘full Highland dress’, described by the painter David Wilkie as kilt and hose ‘with a kind of flesh-coloured pantaloons underneath’ and by a Lowland laird as ‘the Royal Tartan Highland dress with buff-coloured trowsers like flesh to imitate his Royal knees, and little bits of Tartan stocking like other ...”

“... on the circumstances in which it is appropriate to rewrite a constitution, and this usually means removing the drafting of constitutional amendments from the normal political process. But in Britain, Parliament can draft new statutes amending the constitution any time it likes, and it does not have to worry whether these new statutes can be justified in ...”

“... are special ones, and it would seem on the face of it that the same limitations must apply. For David Lodge is writing about Catholics as Catholics, about their particular dilemmas, their casuistical puzzles, the blind alleys that modern Catholic prescriptions lead them into, about their various ways out, and finally about the astonishingly sudden and ...”

“... to those capable of understanding it, a specific message. Inner lives matter, but so does the means by which they might be communicated and made to count. Neck-ties were a feminist issue. Cicely Hamilton appears in Rebel Women as a suffragette playwright and as the co-founder (with Bessie Hatton) of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League. But Hamilton ...”