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“... Of all nations’, writes Ian Ousby, ‘we’, the English, have ‘perhaps the most strongly defined sense of national identity – so developed and so stylised, in fact, that we are frequently conscious of it as a burden or restraint’. I wonder what he can possibly mean by that. The most anomalous thing about England in comparison with all other European nations (of course it isn’t a nation, but even in comparison with Scotland and Wales) is that it doesn’t have the formal marks of national identity acquired even by Iceland or Finland, Luxembourg or Albania ...”

“... estimates that since 1979 the state has sold about two million hectares – about a tenth of Britain’s landmass – which at today’s prices would be worth £400 billion, ten times the amount realised by its most valuable component, the sale of social housing. His estimate includes land qua land such as forests, artillery ranges and municipally owned ...”

“... years might do irreparable damage to the myth carefully cultivated at the time: which was that for Britain, unlike France, say, or the Netherlands, or Belgium, the process was smooth and friendly. Britain, so the story went, was freely granting self-government to its colonies as the culmination of imperial rule, which had ...”

“... an exhibition of the work of a British artist. It is also one of the dullest. Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams have resisted the tendency of the last fifteen years or so by which the catalogues of major exhibitions have often been presented as major interpretative studies of the artist and his times. Constable is a catalogue, nothing more. It ...”

“... others, including Desmond Boal, a close collaborator of the Democratic Unionist Party leader, Ian Paisley, were willing to explore the idea of a federal Ireland. Paisley was quick to retreat from this, but did not denounce his friend. (Indeed, Paisley’s reputation as an irreconcilable afforded him some opportunistic licence: he had briefly contemplated ...”

“... Reading Ian McIntyre’s new Life of Reith I found myself longing for just one deed, one word, one sentiment from the great man which I could admire. In public office, notably as the architect and first Director-General of the BBC, he may have achieved a number of admirable ends, if fewer than pious legend attributes to him ...”

“... that ‘whenever the Daily Mirror or the Daily Herald had reports of Labour MPs objecting to Britain using force against the Egyptians my workmates went wild ... Soon they saw even Hugh Gaitskell, Labour’s leader, as a backslider. The Gyppos had hit us, so we should hit them.’ Dr Owen concedes, in passing, that he disagreed with them about the ...”

“... Palace, the museum of labour history on Glasgow Green. A bronze bust of Willie Gallacher by Ian Walters was not so much unveiled as proclaimed. It sits at the top of the building, in the room where Ken Currie’s controversial Rivera-style murals of working-class history can be seen around the ceiling: but the speeches were made in the Winter Garden ...”

“... Commonwealth – a development without parallel in history’. At the time, many people in Britain, including millions who were not Tories, believed that. Some still do. The myth persists that decolonisation after 1945 was a dignified, planned process. Its advance may have been jostled by the impatience of half-educated agitators, but the empire’s ...”

“... in chronological order, beginning with the ships that brought the trading riff-raff from Britain, America, France, Russia and Holland to Yokohama. We see a cigar-smoking American mounted on his splendid horse, led by a tattooed Japanese groom. There are foreign business establishments with Chinese servants and Japanese courtesans and European ...”

“... Certainly he must be given credit for the creation of the Committee of Imperial Defence. But after Britain’s performance in the Boer War no prime minister could have left things as they were. Reform had been long overdue even before South Africa laid bare our military deficiencies. Balfour, characteristically, did nothing drastic. Ten years earlier a ...”

“... The item which seems set to stay longest with me from Ian Jack’s alert and precisely-written record of British life in the Seventies and Eighties comes from the opening memoir of his father, which supplies a deeper soil, or subsoil, to the son’s coverage of more recent matters for the Sunday Times and (since Wapping) the Observer: Few of his workplaces survive ...”

“... art and innovativeness behind his seemingly artless prose, but with some few exceptions – Ian Dyck is one – current historians are not much interested in Cobbett. Mainly this is because he appears too much a known quantity, but it is also the case that what was once styled labour history has become deeply unfashionable, while Cobbett can seem too ...”

“... As this was during his stint at the Treasury under Chancellor Lawson, who was determined to get Britain in by hook or by crook, he apparently decided he’d better not disagree openly with his immediate superior, though he did tell him his views privately. Then, when he steps over Geoffrey Howe’s bloodstains and arrives at the Foreign Office, Mr Major ...”

“... which, because it was valid in Rome, tied Maria to him but which, because it was invalid in Britain, did not tie him to her. Although its invalidity (thanks to the 1772 Act) did not bring the Act of Settlement into operation, his marriage would have caused a major political crisis had it become fully known. Yet Smith is surely right to blame ...”