“... He obviously enjoyed being made much of and he liked a good junket. A trip to Japan with Angus Wilson was particularly rewarding. At one striptease club, as Wilson recorded, ‘when word went round that we were Spender and Wilson – every single person in the place asked for our ...”

“... Party and of no party at all. Many of the contributors still are these things, though some, like Michael Young, have returned to the Labour Party de jure and others de facto. It was a measure both of the successes of the Conservative Party in the Eighties and the apparent decay of the social-democratic and Marxist alternatives that such a popular front was ...”

“... fair game. We should also remember that the last Oxford-educated man to lead the Labour Party was Michael Foot and that its last Oxford-educated prime minister was Harold Wilson. About Wilson’s leadership people can differ – I think it was by no means as bad as many have argued ...”

“... totalling eleven hundred pages, a fact which would have undoubtedly pleased their subject. Both Michael Newman’s ‘Political Biography’ and Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman’s ‘A Life on the Left’ rightly insist on their man’s public face. But even his political life was peculiar, if only because this profoundly political man never became a ...”

“... appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene had some ...”

“... but which have since become available. Substantial biographies of Lawrence by John Mack and Jeremy Wilson, in 1976 and 1989 respectively, have denigrated Aldington’s achievement. Nevertheless he got quite a lot right and it was never again going to be possible to treat Lawrence as simply the preux chevalier, the schoolboyish hero of derring-do romance. ...”

“... All the shops​ on my university campus have gone cashless. The vendors at our farmers’ market use little card readers that plug into their phones. We use cash very little these days and coins even less. By recent historical standards this is an aberration. Since the 1850s and 1860s, when banknotes were standardised in Britain and the United States respectively, most people, most of the time, have thought of money in terms of coins and paper banknotes, marked with numbers to indicate their value in relation to one another and to the goods and services for which they can be exchanged ...”

“... previously misidentified problems sometimes makes his own study more reminiscent of J. Dover Wilson’s What Happens in ‘Hamlet’? (1935). Although Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness contains various disclaimers to the effect that Lewis really does understand that Hamlet is a play (or rather a piece of ‘poetic drama’, which for him usually seems to ...”

“... off a convincing snarl. Yet he is remembered for certain qualities which appreciate over time. Michael Wreszin’s biography succeeds in spite of its invocation of the conservative revolutionary. While a genuine radical like James Cameron could famously say of himself that he was ‘conservative about everything except politics’, and while it’s true ...”

“... in 1967, Attlee began to be missed and appreciated. As the Labour Party ran slowly downhill under Wilson, Callaghan and Foot, Attlee shuffled uphill to join the immortals. Comparisons between past and present told heavily in Attlee’s favour, and the golden age of 1945 took its place in Labour mythology. Both Left and Right of the Party looked back to 1945 ...”

“... is always stimulated to an astonishing degree by clever blackguardism’) he hired Lockhart and Wilson, a couple of Scottish lawyers as blackguardly as they were cynical. ‘Wilson was tall, burly, fair-haired, florid-complexioned, gregarious: Lockhart small, dark, atrabilious, conspiratorial.’ What does that sentence ...”

“... at all of what had gone wrong with their little project. Was there a single member of the Wilson Front Bench who could stand up for a second to the icy brilliance of James, a black product of British colonialism who had come back to slay every kind of illusion, including the illusions of black nationalism and Soviet fraternal aid? At the back of the ...”

“... owing to his lack of assiduity in his attendance beneath the portrait of Queen Anne’ into ‘Michael Howard didn’t think Norman Stone did enough lecturing’? Nearly every page would have profited from half a dozen footnotes. As it is we’re confronted with sentences such as ‘I have since moved to Vespasiennes & to Gwyn Williams (but am not ...”

“... did not want three simultaneous books about himself. Haines, former press secretary to Sir Harold Wilson, was leader-writer of the Daily Mirror when Maxwell bought it and confidently expected the sack, especially after he had publicly voiced scorn for his new master. Attitudes are quick to be struck and unstruck in Fleet Street. Somehow Haines persuaded ...”

“... detached reflections on Mrs Thatcher from the pen of John Vincent. As a final savoury, Tony Benn, Michael Fraser, David Marquand and David Butler sum up the entire era. The argument starts with the first and by some way the best piece in the collection, Paul Addison’s essay on ‘The Road from 1945’. Addison takes issue with Corelli Barnett’s Audit of ...”