“... ethos of Welfare State consensus politics, which so dominated English life from Attlee to Wilson, has not only been at the forefront of some of his writing, but has also provided the unifying background and underlying value structure to all of it. For nearly forty years, Briggs has been the most ‘relevant’ of historians – of his time and for his ...”

“... is that many of Cartier-Bresson’s sitters are famous: Sartre, Bonnard, Carson McCullers, Edmund Wilson. The pictures seem to reinforce what we know of the sitters, and also to be direct evidence of the truth of what we know. But the evidence is really little more direct than the evidence David’s portraits give us of ...”

“... them with fancy-dress pageants.The first signs of a new American dispensation came with Woodrow Wilson, who considered Central America a field for democratic tutelage, with interventions between 1913 and 1916 in Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. ‘We have with armed force invaded, made war upon, and conquered the two small republics,’ Teddy ...”

“... us, for instance, Lou Reed stumbling around in New York, the New York Dolls in Paris and Brian Wilson in ‘psychicpain’, as well as Iggy Pop and the Rolling Stones. Chapters on later stars like Morrissey, Guns ’N’ Roses and Happy Mondays lack this vivid authenticity. Looking back, you can see why Kent made such an impact. When he started writing in ...”

“... a Libyan tribe that controlled virtually all trans-Saharan trade. Recent British fieldwork, led by David Mattingly, has demonstrated that this civilisation, in an area where average annual rainfall is less than 10 mm, practised intensive agriculture supported by qanats (locally called foggaras): underground tunnels that tapped an aquifer in the slopes of an ...”

“... certain spooks or ex-spooks of plotting – effectively or otherwise – to bring down Harold Wilson. It was certainly not – on its own – evidence of mental illness on Wilson’s part. MI5 was bound to be a likely suspect: highly secretive, socially exclusive, largely unaccountable, right-wing, reputedly clever, and ...”

“... terrorism’ against his editors, reducing supposedly hard men like Kelvin MacKenzie and David Montgomery to stammering wrecks and causing Patsy Chapman, the editor of the News of the World, to suffer a nervous breakdown. ‘These were the calls I came to dread,’ Neil writes. ‘Not because I feared the consequences but because they were unpleasant ...”

“... The term was further defined, and given academic respectability, by the sociologist William Julius Wilson. Taking broadly the same groups, he characterised them as ‘that heterogeneous grouping of families and individuals who are outside the mainstream of the American occupational system’. Wilson argued that as the middle ...”

“... biographies which have the deeper and wider resonance of a novel’: Christopher Booker), A.N. Wilson tells a funny anecdote about Mussolini that was new to me, though I had just finished Denis Mack Smith’s Mussolini. It runs: ‘Mussolini had in fact modelled his style of dress on that of his favourite film stars, Laurel and Hardy, whose sartorial ...”

“... sometimes with his anti-semitism and childish fascism that I cannot write to him’. When Edmund Wilson wanted to republish some early letters of mine I made him change ‘Jews’ to ‘New York people’ in the text. What more can a man do? At the same time I supported Ezra’s release from the nuthouse, for impeccable reasons, and gifted him with plenty ...”

“... In​ 1930, Edmund Wilson went on the road for the New Republic. He covered striking textile workers in Massachusetts, militant miners in West Virginia and suicides in industrial cities. His pieces concerned social conflict and ruined lives, but Wilson had a deep interest in the new industrial world that was still taking shape ...”

“... on Conservative economic policy. One of the most influential of modern Shakespeare critics, G. Wilson Knight, gave his blessing to Britain’s campaign against Argentina on the grounds that it embodied the essential spirit of Shakespeare’s plays. The myth of Shakespeare is also a powerful force for intellectual conservatism: its notion of essential ...”

“... the present crisis. The traditional social democratic solution, tried by George Brown and Harold Wilson in the Sixties and by Michael Foot and Jim Callaghan in the Seventies, is the ‘social contract’ – a private deal between the Government and the unions, by which the unions trade wage restraint in return for extensions of their organisational ...”

“... served alongside us. The United States was, at the time, preoccupied with Vietnam, to which Harold Wilson declined to commit British troops. The Borneo campaign was won largely by our domination of the immediate area of the border with Indonesia. There were a series of operations across the border to attack Indonesian military bases and communications. None of ...”

“... extended feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue Velvet) and that she resented Andy Warhol for making millions by turning her face into a silk screen image. What the book doesn’t do is discuss Taylor’s film performances in any depth. This ...”