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“... and Irish affairs, contributed to a sense of general crisis. MPs demanded better government; William Pitt’s premiership after 1783 depended not just on providing it but on being seen to do so. Since the 1760s, popular tribunes like John Wilkes and John Cartwright had been changing the terms of debate by demanding more press freedom and more political ...”

“... Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers ...”

“... politeness and withdrawn courtesy, that he subsequently became. His loathing for the poet Austin Clarke emerges freely in these letters. He openly satirised him in his novel Murphy as Austin Ticklepenny and attacked his work in an essay for the Bookman in 1934. Nor was he known for his personal courtesy in the years before he left Dublin. When one night the ...”

“... as the record was a clean one,’ one of its advisers said, he saw no reason to alter it. Maurice Clarke, the inspector who approved Titanic for sailing, defended his cursory survey by saying that no more was customary: ‘Well, you will remember I am a civil servant,’ he told the British inquiry. ‘Custom guides us a good bit.’ When the collision ...”

“... for the Tory leadership in 2005. He also recounts a testy cabinet meeting at which Gove and William Hague clashed about the government’s response to the Arab Spring – Gove wanting to take the side of freedom, Hague preferring caution. What struck Cameron wasn’t the argument but the fact that it made it into the next day’s papers, ‘something ...”

“... bad-trip imagery, like the cut-up technique Bowie used to compose the lyrics, is borrowed from William Burroughs. The title song is introduced with a toe-curling yell of: ‘This ain’t rock’n’roll, this is genocide!’ But that’s soon forgotten in the gloriously overlong, overripe, decadent mess of anarchic guitars, squelching horns and exuberant ...”

“... of Wonder’. This movement, exemplified by names like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, SF’s sturdy dead-white-guy canon, is where a fascination with technology and the future became mashed up with American exceptionalist ideology: technocratic triumphalism, Manifest Destiny, libertarian survivalist bullshit. Hard SF fuelled both the Cold ...”

“... the reservations she had held all along.When Major lost heavily to Blair in 1997, Thatcher backed William Hague to succeed him, swinging enough MPs behind her choice to get him comfortably over the line. When Hague lost to Blair just as badly four years later, Thatcher gave her support to Iain Duncan-Smith, helping him to see off Michael Portillo and Kenneth ...”

“... on science in a way so profound that our attitude to it approaches a kind of faith. Arthur C. Clarke said that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ This is a remark beloved of SF fans, and endlessly quoted in discussions of what might happen if there were ever to be contact between humans and aliens (or time travel ...”

“... population growth’. The lead author of both the 2017 and 2019 reports, an ecologist named William Ripple, told Business Insider that ‘if an individual is concerned about climate change, three things to consider include: one, reducing the use of fossil fuels; two, eating mostly a plant-based diet; and three, having fewer ...”

“... the screws. The first attempt to introduce market competition into the NHS was made by Kenneth Clarke in 1990, in the dying months of Thatcher’s rule. The ‘internal market’ was rushed in, ignoring the views of the medical profession. It didn’t work. Tony Blair’s first health minister, Frank Dobson, read its funeral rites when Labour came to power ...”

“... Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he ...”