“... of duty and the hope that he could shield colleagues more successfully from within the system. John Heilbron called his biography of Planck The Dilemmas of an Upright Man. Stern takes the same line, gloomily but fairly recording Planck’s small victories and large surrenders. To conflicts of conscience was added personal tragedy. One son had been killed ...”

“... End, especially Oxford Street and its environs, into a retail centre that made urban shopping a major leisure activity for women. The rise of modern shopping opened the city streets to respectable women, and played a significant role in both feminism and consumer culture. Although the study of British retailing is, as she explains, a flourishing academic ...”

“... often indulged friends or relatives. (Play It as It Lays was scripted by Dominick’s brother, John Gregory Dunne, and his wife, Joan Didion, and was an adaptation of Didion’s warning novel on Hollywood.) But he threw parties, and for a few years real class people came, and he took their pictures. He hadn’t set out to be a studied photographer, but he ...”

“... This dogged admiration for the public sector is an important fact of British life and has major electoral consequences: the Conservative Party paid a heavy price for its alienation of the public sector and its professional employees, and the Labour Party seems set to do exactly the same. Equally dangerous are the Government’s assumptions about the ...”

“... the failure to conclude an agreement as the ‘greatest disappointment’ of his administration. John Kennedy came closest to success when the Limited Test Ban Treaty came into force on 10 October 1963, just a few weeks before his assassination, though that treaty, which prohibited nuclear tests in the oceans, atmosphere and space, did not prohibit ...”

“... always took around with him. (At one point he could eat only Bengers baby foods.) His portrait by John Singer Sargent, which adorns the cover of this volume, makes him look, in the view of Sargent’s biographer, like ‘a business executive’. He attracted neither the adoration nor the hatred that was directed at the more charismatic Curzon and ...”

“... Dana Spiotta’s novel is loosely based on the story of Katherine Ann Power, a Brandeis sociology major who in 1970 helped organise a bank robbery during which a police officer was killed. To begin with, Power ran with another girl, her college room-mate and co-robber, hiding out in women’s communes; after the friend’s arrest, she settled in western ...”

“... of the Heron’; ‘Chivalry and Shame’ and so on. In his conclusion, he praises Edward for five major achievements: the restoration of royal authority after his father’s disastrous reign; the maintenance of domestic peace; the reassertion of England’s power on the international stage; the development of Parliament; and the practice of ‘modernised ...”

“... experiences than ever before. ‘Since Christmas,’ Accidia wrote in 1955, ‘we calculate that John has spoken to over four hundred people – I to about four, and those would be the dustman, fishman, policeman and the woman from one of the Harewood Estate lodges.’ The life of the postwar married woman, diminished and degraded as it was, was whipped up ...”

“... resource. Blackwood’s Lady-Carolineness, her unhappy childhood, busy sex life, connections to major figures in art and literature, and gaudy drinking does make her a toothsome subject. As she must have realised. Schoenberger was suggested to Blackwood, by then living on Long Island, when she said she was looking for a biographer. They spoke on the ...”

“... and carefully observed trashy language: ‘I see a fleet of Jeeps, pick-ups, and 4WDs bearing major Halogen light-show action, plus Skye’s Wagoonmobile (her mother’s rusted AMC Matador sloppily painted with daisies, peace signs, and pine trees and the license plate LIVED B4) and Harmony’s Celica PRV, beating us here from the gym (the Princess ...”

“... When Major Henry committed suicide, Proust wrote that the Dreyfus Affair, hitherto pure Balzac, had become Shakespearean. While the Iraq affair obviously differs from Dreyfus, we can see what Proust meant. Yet the Iraq crisis had been unfolding before Dr David Kelly’s death – whatever Lord Justice Hutton’s inquiry concludes – and the sense that Iraq did not cause but nevertheless represents a crisis of the Labour Party has been with us for months now ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”

“... cent of the population had been born in the New Commonwealth. The National Front’s candidate, John Fairhurst, had stood in nearby Hayes and Harlington in the two 1974 elections. He wasn’t standing in Southall in the hope of securing a high vote, but because the NF thought putting up a candidate there would get them publicity. On 23 April, 2875 police ...”

“... among his many books, seems to give pride of place to a blockbuster history of the Cold War. Dr John Lewis, editor of the Modern Quarterly, so far from being, as Inglis would have it in one of his punchy characterisations, a ‘hard nut’ of the Communist Party, was an ex-Unitarian minister, much given to moral discourse and retaining a distinctly clerical ...”