“... calamity beside which another low moment in Labour’s history – the election of 1983, when Michael Foot’s Labour Party was reduced to 209 seats – seems a minor triumph. The electoral massacre of 1931 was the making of Attlee. In the cull of Labour’s big beasts, Ernest Bevin, Arthur Henderson and Herbert Morrison all failed to win seats, but ...”

“... putting the finishing touches to a government reshuffle that would see him shunt his old friend Michael Gove from the Department of Education to a new role as chief whip. In effect he was clearing the decks for the following year’s election and he needed one of his most contentious and least popular ministers to be less visible. Still, he discussed it ...”

“... be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor ...”

“... was a tape-recorded conversation between Hamilton and the First Secretary to the Treasury, Michael Heseltine, in which Hamilton denied any ‘financial relationship’ with Ian Greer. Greer knew he had paid, and realised his fellow plaintive would be exposed in court as a liar. He told Hamilton he wanted to fight the case separately, with a new set of ...”

“... long.Margaret: Yes. Very.Plomley died in harness in 1985 after 1786 episodes. He was succeeded by Michael Parkinson, twenty years younger and an experienced TV chat show host, who found the experience bruising and left after two years. In his autobiography, Parkinson says that Plomley’s widow, Diana (who’d wanted Plomley’s old friend John Mortimer to ...”

“... down as chairman of BSkyB. According to some people, like the secretary of state for education, Michael Gove, the Sun’s former editor Kelvin MacKenzie and its current associate editor Trevor Kavanagh, one of the unfortunate victims of the phone-hacking scandal is News International itself. The company is being pilloried for practices that were ...”

“... Hawthorne. No circle in the South could match that intellectual array. Nevertheless, along with Michael O’Brien, Genovese has successfully revived interest in Southern antebellum thinkers whose obscurity, they claim, is unmerited. The Southern Tradition reaffirms his long-standing devotion to the pro-slavery thinkers but takes still greater delight in ...”

“... it, which is a large part of the reason there have been so many of them.It was Osborne who spooked Gordon Brown out of calling an election in the autumn of 2007 by promising big cuts in inheritance tax. The policy should have been grist to Brown’s mill – same old Tories looking after their own – but instead Brown took fright when he saw how popular it ...”

“... the Channel to begin coining money in Antwerp. On 17 July, the bank’s first deputy governor, Michael Godfrey, eager to see war at first hand, strolled into the trenches and found himself crouching alongside the king, who was furious to encounter him there. As Macaulay writes in his History of England,‘Mr Godfrey, you ought not to run these hazards, you ...”

“... party that our parents were insistent should not include the children from the terraced houses,’ Michael Burns wrote, recalling VE Day celebrations in Tolworth near Kingston. And it was much the same eight years later in New Malden at the Coronation festivities (‘They’re much too posh for street party’ was the headline in the People). If there is a ...”

“... to Suffolk to live on as a clergyman’s daughter, despite her loss of faith. The failed poet Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying also cuts himself off from his family and everyone who’s close to him, but nonetheless ends up getting his girl pregnant, marrying her, and acquiring both an aspidistra and a job.Orwell later wanted to suppress A ...”

“... psychiatrist-bashing. (Both also provided the occasion for first-rate books: on Peter Sutcliffe, Gordon Burn’s Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son and Nicole Ward-Jouve’s The Street-Cleaner; on Dennis Nilsen, Brian Masters’s Killing for Company.) Before the 1981 trial of Peter Sutcliffe for the 13 murders he committed in the North of England between ...”

“... inhabits a milieu, or space, in which the standards of plain speaking were set by the redoubtable Michael Davie, who really should get back there and sort out his errant protégés as soon as possible. Good journalists should not waste time producing bad PhD theses. In the academic context there is some reason for the success of pseudo-scientific ...”

“... at other times, in the words of Sir Alexander Ogston, ‘human nature forgets unseen foes.’And Gordon Stewart’s 1963 account of the first hospital outbreak of MRSA concluded: ‘Lastly, and most important, patients harbouring these rare strains must be isolated, vigorously treated, and preferably should be sent out of hospital as soon as possible.’ The ...”

“... of One for My Baby is called Alfie (Parsons seems to be paying homage to characters played by Michael Caine). Alfie’s wife is called Rose. Rose dies on him. She was working in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with a woman who had a young daughter of ...”