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“... qualities are even applauded by his father-in-law, which is not always the case in human affairs. Lord Wheatley, in his admirably modest account of a meritorious Scot’s progress from a Shettleston boyhood to the highest reaches of his country’s legal and political life, offers a magisterial stamp of approval: Tam, he concedes, may be a controversial ...”

“... Labour had continued Conservative efforts at reform by appointing a royal commission chaired by Lord Wheatley to upgrade Scotland’s local authority structure, and its conclusions were drastic. It proposed a two-tier system of regions and districts to replace the existing guddle of boundaries, some of which – the royal burghs – dated back to the ...”

“... In 1975, when he was 78, Dennis Wheatley finally achieved his long-held ambition of being elected to a really smart gentlemen’s club, White’s. On entering the building, so he told a friend, his first objective was to consult the membership book to find out how many had supported his candidacy – a gratifying 35 ...”

“... The name​ given to Phillis Wheatley by her family is lost. She may have been born in modern-day Senegal or Gambia, and was called ‘Phillis’ after the ship in which she was forcibly transported to Boston in 1761. Wheatley was the name of the prosperous merchant family who purchased her ‘for a trifle’ – ‘a slender, frail, female child, supposed to have been about seven years old, at this time, from the circumstances of shedding her front teeth’, and dressed in ‘a quantity of dirty carpet’, according to Margaretta Odell, an unreliable Victorian descendant of the Wheatleys ...”

“... on virtually unaided until Latham and Matthews came along. The previous standard edition by H.B. Wheatley appeared in ten volumes between 1893 and 1899, a date closer to the original publication in 1825 than to the present. It’s true that Wheatley delivered a much fuller text than his predecessors, omitting only ‘a few ...”

“... factor was prevented from entering her house by a crowd including the local ILP councillor, John Wheatley (one of the ILP MPs elected in 1922, and responsible in 1924 for the Housing Act, which enabled central government to subsidise the building of council housing). An effigy of the factor was burned in the street, and he was chased all the way back ...”

“... what is it worth?’ Bibliophiles are like that, always asking what it’s worth, in cash terms. Lord Emsworth didn’t worry what his pig was worth. Gussie Fink-Nottle and Ken Livingstone love their newts for themselves, not for their market value. P.G. Wodehouse: A Centenary Celebration, 1881-1981 is also lumbered with a bibliography, which takes up half ...”

“... The roll-call of Red Clyde heroes was fondly recited, Labour men, ILPers, CPers, heretics – Wheatley, McShane, Maxton ... And why was I there myself if not because I’d read as a boy a book about Maxton and fallen at once under the twin spells of the Red Clyde and of labour history? The People’s Palace sells a postcard of Maxton. In an election ...”

“... weeks and months, felt not only by Radicals and Dissenters but by many people in Britain, as Lord North’s administration bungled the American situation until it appeared to be ‘knowingly exploding its most valuable trading relationship’ and war had become inevitable. Theophilus Lindsey, a former Anglican clergyman turned Dissenter, who became one ...”

“... mother was sympathetic to the abolitionist cause and had copied out lines for him from Phillis Wheatley, freed slave and poet. He had himself heard the Enlightenment philosopher Dugald Stewart’s lectures in Edinburgh and was familiar with the idea that any African inferiority was due to the miserable conditions of slavery. His experience on the ...”