“... on standards in public life, a member of the Commission, MacGregor’s former cabinet colleague Tom King, signalled his approach to MacGregor’s conduct with the memorable sentence: ‘I will embarrass you now by saying I always thought you should be Chancellor of the Exchequer.’ MacGregor’s antics were governed by the prevailing Parliamentary ethic ...”

“... that ‘for Gore and the other populists, the imperialism of the two Roosevelts and Woodrow Wilson – Polk, too, earlier – was a terrible distraction from our destiny, which was the perfection of our own unusual if not, in the end, particularly “exceptional” society.’ The let-down at the end of that sentence is one that I wish he would ...”

“... I have seen the word used recently in pieces about Sonic Youth, the reformed Sleater-Kinney, Tom Petty and Madonna, among others. Phillips found a perfect vehicle for self-starter activism in a music that many might assume was still quintessentially pale and male and terminally insular. As if on cue, here is Solange, talking about A Seat at the Table on ...”

“... of Titian, of Mola, of Salvator, of the Poussins, Claude, Rubens, Elzheimer, Rembrandt, and Wilson, spurns all relation with this kind of map-work. Fuseli did introduce a small saving clause in defence of painters of ‘Views’: their ‘enumerations’ of the objects in a scene become ‘little more than topography’ only if they are not ‘assisted ...”

“... of the ‘Two Cultures’ idea has a lot to do with politics. The dream of technocracy, Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’ image, is held to have failed, and therefore to have been a dream and a failure of the left. The facts don’t bear this out: technocracy remained the mode of both civil and military developments, and the goal of Tory as well as Labour ...”

“... your lamp, there citron to nibbleAnd coffee dribble … Frost is in the stubble.Then came Edmund Wilson’s essay ‘Flaubert’s Politics’, which ends with this sentence: ‘As the first big cracks begin to show in the structure of the 19th century, [Flaubert] shifts his complaint to the shortcomings of humanity, for he is unable to believe in, or even to ...”

“... his long and loving friendship with the self-thwarting Esther Murphy in The Fifties (1986), Edmund Wilson recalled how vividly, if also profligately, Murphy – whose particular tragedy was to have an alcohol-saturated writer’s block of mammoth proportions and lifelong duration – embodied ‘the special characteristics of our race of the 1920s: habit of ...”

“... Both had married young to older intellectual powerhouse grumps – McCarthy to Edmund Wilson, who locked her in a room to force her to write, Sontag to Philip Rieff, the sociologist she met as a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as Partisan ...”

“... to mockery of its deadpan original, but his Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great was attuned to a broader climate of false feeling and the bombast that floated it. Gillray worked from a similar ambition. Unlike Fielding, he made a career of it.His nearest precursor was Hogarth, in the kinetic scenes of Marriage à la ...”

“... mixture of times: post-dated in emergence, pre-dated in form. Pan-hellenism was in many ways, as Tom Nairn pointed out long ago, ‘the original European model of successful nationalist mobilisation’, producing in the Greek Wars of independence the first victorious movement of national liberation after the Congress of Vienna. Yet, he went on, ‘the very ...”

“... a-Bang’.) To make money, Elton began to work as a session musician, singing backing vocals for Tom Jones and playing piano with the Hollies. He also worked for a label called Marble Arch which knocked out versions of chart hits and sold the albums cheap in supermarkets. This, Elton points out, might sound sad, but it was in fact ‘screamingly, howlingly ...”

“... United States in the year following its publication – even such serious-minded critics as Edmund Wilson and the young Lionel Trilling regularly disparaged her as spinsterish, middlebrow and reactionary: a kind of tiresome maiden aunt in the back parlour of American letters. True, Cather had her defenders – but as Acocella grimly notes, they were prone to ...”

“... omnipotence has survived into the digital age. Politicians apparently wish it to be true. Harold Wilson was obsessed with the idea that the Daily Mirror could undo him; Neil Kinnock in his defeat accepted that it was ‘The Sun Wot Won It’; and more recent governments convinced themselves that the Daily Mail under Paul Dacre’s editorship was the voice of ...”

“... Johnson the only Southern Democrat to have been elected President since the Civil War was Woodrow Wilson, who had built his political career in New Jersey; since Johnson, no non-Southern Democrat has gone to the White House. Losing its virulent Jim Crow edge at home, the white South has acceded to national power. Conservatives who once opposed the end of ...”

“... capitalist-ridden, landlord-ridden Scotland into a Scottish socialist commonwealth’. In 1968, Tom Nairn criticised the ‘common myth of Scottish left-ness’, arguing that although Scotland was ‘certainly a more egalitarian country than England’, its ‘gritty sense of equality derives from the old theocracy, not from Jacobinism or Bolshevism … the ...”