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“... officers, past, present and future; two of its authors are Brigade officers. John Springhall and Brian Fraser have collaborated on the British chapters; Michael Hoare has written the chapters on the movement overseas. The Brigade has shown an admirable willingness – by no means common among voluntary bodies – to give its historians free access to its ...”

“... for herself and her party: ‘those were the values when our country became great,’ she told Brian Walden three years ago. The publication of these four books provides a timely opportunity for testing her claims. Historians, mostly on the left, have so far dismissed them, and even those not on the left rightly worry about the propagandist way in which ...”

“... Intellectuals – informed people who enjoy accumulating and diffusing ideas – were more prominent in Victorian public life than they are today. Public life was then confined to a well-educated élite, and intellectual activity was less rarefied in language, less specialised in scope, more readily discussed in periodicals designed for general circulation ...”

“... Social movements have been in vogue among British historians since the 1950s. This is partly because Labour’s agenda, strangely combining statist welfare and libertarian protest, has dominated the political and intellectual climate. But there is also a professional reason for these historiographical priorities. The reaction against the narrowness of the old political and constitutional history has never been complete: by choosing social movements as their theme, historians could simultaneously ride the old and respectable horse of political history and the new and fashionable one of sociology ...”

“... It is already beginning to look as though 1979 marked a political and intellectual shift in Britain comparable with 1886, 1906, 1922, 1945 and 1964. For Mrs Thatcher’s electoral victory consolidated an intellectual shift towards conservatism that has penetrated into almost every corner of British society since the mid-1970s. Feminism, always linked to the fortunes of the Left and always vulnerable in the face of unemployment, has not been exempt, and we now seem to be living through one of the movement’s periodic pauses for breath during its long history ...”

“... If there is a third successive Conservative election victory this summer, Labour will plunge once more into debating its own history. Not reluctantly, because as Kenneth Morgan points out, the Party ‘has been captivated, even obsessed, by its history’; even more than the Conservatives it is, he says, ‘a prisoner of its past’. Yet the debate will probably be more painful than in the recent past, because it will need to be more searching and less sectarian ...”

“... there may continue to be minor alarums, such as the recent spat over the entry for Patrick O’Brian). Nonetheless, a not dissimilar kind of sleep-disturbing responsibility fell on its editor, and the project was fortunate to find the ideal man for the job in the Oxford historian Colin Matthew, who had demonstrated his capacity for the task in his ...”

“... book published by the National Portrait Gallery to accompany the BBC series of the same name, Brian Harrison, the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, observes that we are hardly alone ‘in placing the great at the centre of our national myth’: If Lloyd George and Winston Churchill epitomise national resistance to ...”

“... the Whig-Tory conflict as being largely between two rival mythologies of the Civil War. Even Brian Harrison, writing on Drink and the Victorians, is moved to remark that for many Dissenters in the Temperance Movement, the Civil War was very much a live issue, and there is surely a 17th-century legacy in Gladstone’s fear, in 1832, that the First ...”

“... Lesson’, which tells the story of the poet’s lack of a musical talent, ends like this: Miss Harrison, my sallow teacher, filled the term’s report with words which gave no hope, and I was left, relieved, to carry home th’iambic tick-tock of her metronome. The pay-off is ingenious, in that the boy’s redeeming vocation, to be a poet, is obliquely ...”

“... contribute a real solidity to his guiding ideas. Greenland’s study notes, with reference to Brian Aldiss, the need for Science Fiction to outgrow a vapid Utopianism. George Turner takes the detour of futurology to persuade us that we will never be much better than we are. Equally telling evidence of the crisis of Utopianism can be found in the latest ...”

“... to the hassles of the caddie’s life; he makes caddies’ shortcomings the nub of his new novel. Harrison Tweed ‘wasn’t exactly looking for a career’ when he took up caddying. He knew that he didn’t want to follow his father into the shoe factory: shouldering a golfer’s bag seemed like a profitable stopgap until he could find a better job. Tweed ...”

“... to the Man. There’s comradeship between celebrity dissidents. Sometimes this is practical: Sarah Harrison, Assange’s right-hand woman, flew to Sheremetyevo airport to help navigate Edward Snowden safely and legally into Moscow and get him a residency permit after his leaks broke in the summer of 2013. Sometimes it’s more nebulous: outlaws bond, as we ...”

“... but I can’t be the only hack on nodding terms with the hostage story whose collection of Brian Keenan minutiae would take very little time to dust. In terms of media interest, Keenan was the least remembered of the captives of Lebanon, the George Harrison of the hostage scene, the other one. The reporter Robert ...”

“... Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and Robert Ballard, Isabel Nathaniel and Peter Didsbury, Anthony Edkins and Brian Cosgrove. Several get prizes, and in particular Andrew Motion gets the big one, £5,000, for a poem that either is, or ...”