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“... distinctively apart from our own. In calling his study of Victorian Liberalism The Optimists Ian Bradley seeks to make good a more specific claim. He is writing about Liberalism with a big L – the creed of the British Liberal party as expressed by its leading politicians, publicists and men of ideas. And of all these men, it is the Grand Old Man ...”

“... new politics’, and I think I heard Shirley Williams refer to the ‘nodes of the new society’. Ian Bradley sees this new society as a post-social democratic society. For him, liberalism is a mystical cult of the individual. Everything that suits his argument, or rather quasi-religious faith, is dragged into service, including the growth of the ...”

“... with us, above all the hymns of the Victorian and what one might call the long Edwardian age. Ian Bradley’s study is fascinating, once past a misguided Introduction, which develops a long comparison between Victorian hymns and modern soap-operas that seems to embarrass Bradley himself halfway through. He is a ...”

“... with anxiety, but the birth was easy and infancy has been a triumph. Unfortunately, however, Mr Bradley’s instant history of the first few months of the Social Democratic Party tells us a good deal more about its gestation before the launch on 26 March than about its development since. This was inevitable, no doubt. Even instant historians have to get ...”

“... of the SDP have been extensively reported in the press. Yet the full story is worth retelling. Ian Bradley has produced an admirable piece of instant history: a journalist’s account of the SDP’s inception that is well-rooted in a historian’s grasp of long-term antecedents and immediate causes. He can liken the EEC issue to the Corn Laws as a ...”

“... kind of thing better done than it has been done before.’A Celebration includes an extract from Ian Buruma’s study of anglophilia, Voltaire’s Coconuts (1999), which discusses Pevsner in terms of the clash between ‘nativism and internationalism’ – a conflict which, Buruma suggests, he embodied without ever resolving. The objections, which rumble on ...”

“... Stormont Assembly collapsed early last year, has urged the Conservative secretary of state, Karen Bradley, who has been in office for a matter of weeks, not only to ‘set a budget but also to take key decisions impacting on our schools, infrastructure and hospitals’. She wants, in other words, that Northern Ireland be returned to direct rule from ...”

“... wait long for help. ‘You heard?’ a freak-show owner (Willem Dafoe) says to Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper): ‘That little kraut, the one that looks like Chaplin? He just invaded Poland.’ If we’re thinking magically, this is a glimpse of the still unmade The Great Dictator (1940); otherwise, it’s a common comparison that Chaplin chose to ...”

“... Sartre, Fanon, Beauvoir, and the complete works of Georges Bataille. Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Bradley, Collingwood, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty … all gone. No more literary criticism, or literary history, or history, or linguistics. And then there were the sets: Hazlitt’s Works, De Quincey’s (the 14-volume set), the Oxford Wordsworth, the Coleridge ...”

“... Baths. The foundation stone was laid on 18 March 1903. The official opening was on 25 June 1904. Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis’s book Great Lengths: The Historic Indoor Swimming Pools of Britain tells us that E.J. Wakeling, vice chairman of the Shoreditch Baths and Washhouses Committee, animated the occasion by plunging into the pool and swimming a 100-foot ...”

“... What can we possibly say of the claim that ‘the first great revolutionary movements in Europe’ were all ‘more or less imbued with the ideas of Joachim of Fiore’? Or, if ‘more or less’ offers an escape clause, what can we say of another claim: that ‘Joachim created the aggregate of symbols which govern the self-interpretation of modern political society to this day’? Or that ‘it is hardly too much to claim that the vague and powerful assumptions we all make about historical transition have their roots in Joachism’? ‘Aggregate of symbols’, ‘vague and powerful assumptions’, ‘more or less imbued’: whatever the actual history, these phrases bear the mark of very recent times; all were written, in fact, within the last twenty years ...”

“... of rock groups, fashion shoots, book covers, a snap of Bowie from his least Mod phase and a recent Bradley Wiggins mag cover. Actual Mods in the wild? Nothing. A tabloid snap of Mods scattering Rockers on Margate beach is a distant seagull’s eye view of blurry matchstick men. An after-hours photo that purports to show a Mod couple in a 1960s club also frames ...”

“... Irishman Rory McIlroy won a couple of majors and became the number one golfer in the world. Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France. Then came the London Olympics, about which there was a lot of national grumbling, until they started. Britain ended up third in the medals table, behind China and the US. Andy Murray won the US Open in tennis. Justin Rose ...”

“... facilitate navigation, turn out to be a trap.In​ 2005, the former Arsenal and England footballer Ian Wright was filmed at the old Arsenal stadium at Highbury, as part of an ITV documentary about his life. The narrator talks about a schoolteacher, Sydney Pigden, who had been a father figure to Wright when he was growing up in South London. Wright believed ...”

“... presence. On another occasion, Maugham ‘gave him an icy stare’ as Ann Fleming – wife of Ian – chastised him ‘by banging a serving spoon on his offensively prominent ear trumpet’. Christopher Isherwood, on the other hand, found that Maugham’s stammer ‘somehow made you feel that you were stammering, not he’. Raymond Mortimer noted his ...”