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“... chronicle of three generations is the distillation of a much fuller chronicle kept by Harry Smith, the last boss, who quit in 1917. The trouble with Harry is that he is more interested in boilermaking than in social observation. On the run from the Bolsheviks and sharing a freezing hotel room, he notes with delight that the water in his bedside carafe ...”

“... playing an East Asian Moriarty opposite old Burma hand and fully accredited special agent Nayland Smith – Sherlock Holmes with a face ‘sun-baked to the hue of coffee’ – and stalwart Dr (of course) Petrie, who, like his Baker Street predecessor, tells the story and gets the girl. Nayland Smith and Petrie exist in a ...”

“... theme, and it is not just Benn himself who is drawn to the flame. Eric Heffer, Audrey Wise, Michael Meacher, Ken Livingstone and others feature in earnest discussions about whether the time is right for another attempt to capture the flag and how the forces are assembled. The votes of the unions and the membership seem to allow the possibility that the ...”

“... periodical articles, by no means all of which deserve his, or anybody else’s, attention. Nigel Smith, Marvell’s new editor, remarks that the serious annotation of Marvell’s works began only in 1927, with H.M. Margoliouth’s Oxford edition. That edition might never have been projected but for Eliot’s 1921 essay on the poet, itself the culmination of ...”

“... himself into running something like a campaign when competing for the leadership with Iain Duncan Smith and been ready to appear more tractable on Europe; if David Davis had moved decisively in the immediate aftermath of Michael Howard’s resignation or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow ...”

“... and the media are apt to suggest. Consider, for instance, the unfortunate case of Kevin Michael Burrell, a victim of the most recent firearms assault on police officers in Compton. How many officers do you suppose were gunned down in the infamous ’hood of NWA during the thirty years prior to Burrell’s shooting? Would it be a hundred, an annual ...”

“... fantasy of racial degeneration. Luckily the hearties don’t have it all their own way. Michael Crick’s and David Smith’s book describes how, at the same time as Stan Cullis was assembling his Wolves team, Matt Busby at Manchester United was embarking on a managerial career uniquely committed to attractive ...”

“... of the revolution to promote intellectual and religious freedom within the republic, Joseph Smith and William Miller saw liberation as the fruit not of revolution but of exodus. Smith envisioned a new kingdom of the saints and led his followers to the West; the Millerites awaited the end of the world, and prepared ...”

“... banal, its excess evident in the seepage beyond the black borders of the US. Jaune Quick-To-See Smith’s crafty layering in Fifty Shades of White echoes the creation of this elaborate fiction, a fiction that continues to exercise an extraordinary, destructive power. I am reminded of the first maps I saw as a child, hanging on the walls of British ...”

“... as wide as 16 points. Corbyn is the most unpopular opposition leader on record, polling worse than Michael Foot, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband, all of whom went on to lose general elections by significant margins, or did not get to contest them. There are ...”

“... pretending. Much of this ‘renewal’ had, of course, been achieved by Neil Kinnock and John Smith, while the numerical and political decline of the unions, together with a change in the composition of the electorate and the Labour Party’s membership, made ‘renewal’ much easier and, at least to some extent, necessary. Nevertheless, Mr Blair has ...”

“... and the present government is not exempt. The resignation of Mr Kinnock might help Labour. Mr Smith, his likely successor, is obviously more acceptable to the electorate than Mr Kinnock, although I think the effect of the change can be exaggerated. Mr Kinnock has been rather unlucky. It is clear that his ‘Welshness’ in some way does not fit into the ...”

“... I retreated to my thoughts.I felt sure that I had made Vikram Seth appear by thinking about him. Michael Holme, the narrator of An Equal Music, makes the love of his life appear by thinking about her. He’s sitting on a bus in Oxford Street when another bus draws alongside, and there she is: Julia McNicholl, or Julia Hansen as she now is, though ...”

“... offering to be killed or maimed. The volunteering of the pals’ battalions probably derived, as Michael Childs has argued in Labour’s Apprentices: Working-Class Lads in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, less from the instilling of patriotic and militaristic values than from ‘a sense of shared community and fellowship that they themselves had largely ...”

“... as some of its recent practitioners like to think (he mentions as precursors Maurice Cowling and Michael Bentley), but he gives one of the most impressive proofs to date of its potential to open up understanding of ideological messaging, the importance of which in British politics has seldom been adequately recognised, and has sometimes been virtually ...”