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“... On Blunt, it is conjectured that ‘at a time when homosexual acts were still illegal in Britain, he seems to have relished the resulting atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue.’ Of MacLean we learn that, when head of Chancery in Cairo in the late Forties, he was ‘subjected to psychiatric examination for his homosexuality and alcoholism’. It was ...”

“... dependent on a small number of producers whose supplies were liable to run out. For Great Britain and Holland, with their tropical colonies, this was a nightmare, and the most exciting part of Honigsbaum’s book describes the extraordinary adventures of two Yorkshiremen, a Cockney and a Dutchman, who managed to smuggle plants or seeds back from the ...”

“... during a demonstration in Frankfurt in 1973. Beside all this, the urban guerrilla movement in Britain seems small potatoes. Even in the heady days of the late 1960s, when demonstrators besieged the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, British protests were overshadowed by those across the Channel and on the other side of the Atlantic (in France and ...”

“... diagnosis because it was the only form of learning disability not classed as ‘ineducable’ in Britain. In fact autism has become an advocacy disorder, which contributes to the increased rate of diagnosis. Militant middle-class parents fought to have their problem taken seriously. In the United States the provisions for ‘special education’ are very ...”

“... in a year and only 2000 in paperback: which goes some way to support Gore Vidal’s jeer that in Britain there are more novelists than novel-readers.) In Alistair MacLean we have the scarcely forgivable phenomenon of an author who made £20 million in 30 years and who had 18 titles which sold over a million copies (as against 13 James Bond books in that ...”

“... of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of prolixity), the Report is a model of clarity. Its narrative is compelling and its ...”

“... French and German historians, they have been viewed much more uneasily by those who study Britain. This ambivalence is largely attributable to the long-standing assumption, enshrined in English liberalism, that though the nasty Continentals built big bureaucracies, taxed their subjects prohibitively, and eclipsed liberty in the name of raison ...”

“... savouring of the land – the ‘landscape’ – must overlap with more workmanlike uses of it. Ian Thompson’s history of the Lake District is grounded almost exclusively in the aesthetic. ‘Since the Lake District is an imaginative construction,’ he argues, ‘it has no real boundaries, physical or historical.’ So he is thinking of it as a region ...”

“... on loan at Bristol University library, in recognition of Allen Lane’s birthplace. In the 1970s Ian Fletcher and Jim Edwards at Reading University had the bright idea of offering publishers what was in effect curatorship in return for deposit. Reading took on the Macmillan and Longman business materials, which would have been unattractive to more obviously ...”

“... In 1969, while he was serving a prison sentence for unlawful assembly, Ian Paisley sent this message to his congregation: I rejoice with you in the rich blessings of last weekend. I knew that our faithful God would pour out His bounty. In prayer in this cell I touched the Eternal Throne and had the gracious assurance of answered prayer ...”

“... that curious mixture of personal ambition and fantasy which is the hallmark of modern Tory Britain,’ There is an important question here. Why should Archer, normally so bumptious about his Struggle from Log Cabin to White House, miss out so much of the log-cabin experience? A clue may lie in the curriculum vitae which Archer submitted to Cobb in ...”

“... consultation – to play the part of an ally by sanctioning the use for that purpose of bases in Britain. The best of the debate justified Mr Healey’s words of praise, and those of other participants. A high standard of argument was achieved, there was far less of the usual bombast, posturing and silly uproar, and the essential issue was identified. Little ...”

“... to the pervasive, if not cataclysmic resonances of war. The first serious study of 20th-century Britain, Charles Loch Mowat’s Britain between the Wars (1955), neatly managed, as the title indicates, to steer between the century’s two total wars. Liberal British historians found wars very nasty and preferred either to ...”

“... introduction and conclusion, and voilà ! His focus on England and Englishness, as opposed to Britain and Britishness, is timely. Earlier this summer, a leader in the Times attacked Tom Nairn, Eric Hobsbawm and especially Linda Colley for supplying a tendentious, politicised justification for the break-up of ...”

“... the critical moment’. Probably even Cromwell would have doubted that, if God was seeking to help Britain and the Eighth Army at that time, he had done so by killing off its newly designated commander. Again, on VE Day Alanbrooke confided to his diary that often ‘during the last six years’ he had seen God’s ‘guiding hand controlling and guiding the ...”