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“... and Mates has been largely proved right over the Asil Nadir affair which got him sacked from the Northern IrelandOffice. Yet neither man commands all that much respect from other Tories, and whatever their other merits they were the wrong choices as Heseltine’s eyes and ears. Nor ...”

“... Smith, a former Tory Party Treasurer, admitted the payments and promptly resigned as a junior Northern Ireland Minister. Hamilton denied everything to everyone. He told Michael Heseltine that he had had no financial relationship with Greer – a lie direct. He clung to office for ...”

“... if ever, could Labour hope to form a majority in England, or even in England and Wales (with Northern Ireland returning its own non-GB parties to Westminster)? The Scottish Question, which appears to have emerged suddenly in the last year, is an unexpected by-product of Labour’s own devolution arrangements. New Labour’s Scotland Act of ...”

“... their political rivals, the Tories, as unreliable crypto-Jacobites who could not be trusted with office under the Hanoverians. In so far as Jacobitism had any real existence beyond the projections of Whig propaganda, it was the creed of yesterday’s men: ‘the broken-down gentry of the North’, ‘the depressed ...”

“... I did not get around to it for nine years, but I remember that for some time after 1916 we stay-at-home Irish were otherwise preoccupied. I have never read it since, as a whole, for two reasons: the fear that a rereading might deprive me of the memory of that first exquisite experience; and the fear that I might become dominated by the influence of so powerful ...”

“... prison officers were due to finish their evening shift at 8.45, at which time they would head for home. All of them had spent a quiet, routine day in the unit, believed to be completely escape-proof. The Whitemoor SSU is specially designed. It stands within the prison, set in 90 acres of flat open fenland in Cambridgeshire. The modern buildings of the prison ...”

“... if not thousands, of manuscript letters and diaries in British libraries, the Public Record Office and private archives. His generosity in sharing the results of his research with other students and scholars became all too well known and, at the age of 80, under constant demands for help, he passed his archive to the ...”

“... one Prussian), a herbalist (on whose custom I am unqualified to comment), and the Bloomsbury office of A. France Undertakers – one of London’s eldest and most respected carriage trade mortuaries, passing by whose black and gilded storefront, Mr Sweeney can be observed to quicken his pace and heard to whistle the ...”

“... a Supreme Court with a Court of Appeal at its apex for England and Wales, leaving Scotland and Ireland with their own separate systems. Limiting the majority of appeals to a one-stop process seemed a logical way of professionalising the judiciary and saving costs. The Supreme Court of Judicature Act, abolishing the Lords’ appellate jurisdiction, was ...”

“... and, especially, the fact that he had spent the war years in Germany and broadcast from there to Ireland. He lived at that time in Dundrum in the suburbs of Dublin and he had settled, it seemed, into an extremely mellow and happy old age. He still wrote novels and followed public events, but he exuded a sort of dreaminess, loving cats and rabbits, remaining ...”

“... leader, John O’Leary who, in Yeats’s poem, shared his grave with the corpse of ‘romantic Ireland’, observing that the Brotherhood’s ‘propagandist work was … entirely separatist with practically no reference to Republicanism’. Similarly, and just as surprisingly, Townshend quotes Michael Collins, who had fought in 1916 and three years later ...”

“... varieties of embarrassment about Britishness and the English which might be felt in Scotland and Northern Ireland would take up the rest of this piece. And that’s without considering Wales, which plumped for Leave but doesn’t get it in the neck to the same degree.) Brexit as it has lurched along to its uncertain destination has increasingly been ...”

“... is now over and forward to a future which has barely begun. Even the sound pieces on Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, all of which have somewhat richer recent experience than England, are rightly tentative. According to the mission statement riskily disclosed by the editors, these essays critically examine ‘the extensive shift of political ...”

“... open spaces and silence. I left England for the first time in the summer of 1970 to wander about Ireland with a friend; we hitch-hiked our way to Connemara and holed up in a stone cottage on the edge of the ocean. Later that year, I went to Graz to study music. Ever since, I have carried around with me a mental image of the map of Europe which I find ...”

“... Other lesser Tories, such as Mrs Thatcher’s successor in Finchley, Hartley Booth, have left office under a moral cloud. Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith are part of a long Tory tradition. If we throw our minds back to the Thatcher age, various forms of sleaze are associated with the names of Cecil Parkinson, Nicholas ...”