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“... a genteel resort facing east; and Margate, the faded one-time summer playground of industrial Britain, to the north. Farage will contest South Thanet, which comprises Ramsgate, Broadstairs, a sliver of coastal Margate called Cliftonville, and a swathe of extra-Thanetary land to the south that includes the town of Sandwich. One evening in early ...”

“... The British Museum – not a Museum of Britain’, so reads the caption on a photograph of the Museum’s imposing portico, at the start of a recent survey of national collections conducted by the Museums Journal. The BM is not an exhibition of the nation nor does it incorporate one coherently developed collection ...”

“... The more Britain affects a déclassé manner while Thatcherism increases the gulf between rich and poor, the more it comes, superficially, to resemble Australia. Linguists speculate that the Australian accent at its purest and broadest is simply an intact version of late 18th and early 19th-century London English ...”

“... campaign will focus on three issues: taxation, crime and Europe. In this it will be abetted by Britain’s most popular daily newspaper. The Sun, as we know, offers the extreme populist version of right-wing policy and, because of the scale of its readership, is considered by politicians and the media to be an important determinant of ...”

“... past. Thus accounts of the ‘first industrial revolution’ are now likely to address not merely Britain’s European competitors, but also the input of its slave plantations in the Caribbean, the role of textile technologies learned from India, and the degree to which all 17th and early 18th-century European powers lagged behind China economically. These ...”

“... could afford them. There was what businessmen call ‘over-capacity’. Large firms like GEC in Britain, Aérospatiale in France and Messerschmitt in Germany, were licking their lips at the juicy technology and skilled workers waiting to be gobbled up from Yeovil. The prospect seemed familiar. The company would go into receivership. The banks would move in ...”

“... We know all about Republican violence, about its worst excesses; in Britain, some people, maybe even most, know what the initials IRA stand for. I wonder how many could name the principal Loyalist organisations, still less distinguish between them. You could say that there has been little reason for the average Londoner to get acquainted with the world of Loyalist terror: the UFF do not bomb the City, the UVF don’t shoot policemen ...”

“... it seems to be the necessary map, though the country it shows seems significantly detached from ‘Britain’, or in Neal Ascherson’s rechristening, ‘Ukania’. To that group no longer embarrassed at calling itself the Scottish intelligentsia, the cultural opportunities now available in and from the country are simply so much more fascinating than anything ...”

“... My​ military career was on the comic side.’ Self-protective irony was Ian Watt’s chosen register when describing his wartime experience some twenty years later. That experience began when the 24-year-old Lieutenant Watt was posted, along with the rest of the 5th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment, to the Far East in the winter of 1941 ...”

“... idea of nationality, even so complex an argument as that presented by Laurence Lustgarten and Ian Leigh in In from the Cold, is bound to fail. They take nationality for granted, and deny the possibility of loyalty to a free market in ideas. ‘The market’s purported virtue is precisely its impersonality,’ they write: ‘it is inconceivable that people ...”

“... DNA that forms the moral core of the novel by Michael Crichton on which it is based. In the novel, Ian Malcolm, the conscience of the tale, remarks as he lies dying from a raptor attack (in the film he doesn’t die; only villains die on Spielberg’s screen): ‘Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains power, it proves itself ...”

“... paid to their political thought’, and Paul Johnson, whose high-pastiche polemic, Wake Up Britain! A Latter-Day Pamphlet (1994), was resolutely slept through. The Carlylean inflection can also be heard in the newspapers and magazines with which these writers are associated: the two Mails, the two Telegraphs and the Spectator. A kind of ‘vulgar ...”

“... Merdle, or Trollope’s Melmotte. Even Disraeli reckoned that capitalism of the sort that came to Britain with William of Orange (‘Dutch finance’) was detestable: it had resulted in ‘the degradation of a fettered and burthened multitude … made debt a national habit … credit the ruling power … introduced a loose, inexact, haphazard and dishonest ...”

“... undertaking that even Carlyle might have thought displayed commendable industry and endurance (Ian Campbell, who provides this final volume with a graceful introduction, first joined the team in 1964). The unusual decision, taken at the outset, to combine Carlyle’s correspondence with that of his wife has paid off handsomely. As Rosemary Ashton observed ...”

“... subsequent work on religion, literacy and the economy in Scotland has been widely read throughout Britain. Rosalind Mitchison’s work, especially on the Scottish poor in the 18th century, has been similarly influential. Both authors pose large questions which require response in a British context. Houston (who has worked extensively on both Northern England ...”