“... important speeches and fight important fights. She found that role exhausting as well as exciting. David Owen contends and Williams concedes that she let her new party down and damaged her own career by not fighting Warrington – which Roy Jenkins narrowly lost and Williams could certainly have won – in a by-election in spring 1981, when the SDP was riding ...”

“... Art Scene in London, which featured several of her paintings. Its curator, the art historian David Alan Mellor, had been fascinated by the subject in general and by Boty in particular since, as a 13-year-old, he saw Ken Russell’s television film Pop Goes the Easel. Shown as part of the arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the ...”

“... the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have thought, to have a leader intoxicated with ...”

“... written and of a balls-aching boredom.’ In 1960 he found something he did like. He announced to David Selznick that ‘a delightful book’ called To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was ‘going to be a great success’. He himself, he wrote, was the model for the character Dill, being a childhood friend of the author’s. The first letter in Too Brief a ...”

“... space”, third turn, and (in the case of other-initiation) second turn.’ It could be David Coleman warming up for a commentary on slalom surfing (Coleman, incidentally, puts his foot into a footnote in Forms of Talk). Systematic Goffman is not. He writes in a vivid, impressionistic way which he concedes is often, as in much of Forms of ...”

“... of sportive warfare’ – the only other example of it may be the ‘Flyting’ of Dunbar and Kennedy.) It is a very difficult poem: the correct text is often uncertain, and the vocabulary is of the sort that is marked ambiguously ‘obsc.’ in glossaries – or, as one of Montgomerie’s editors puts it, apropos of another piece of invective, ‘it is ...”

“... this from first-hand testimony from defectors, including Saddam’s own son-in-law.’ At Camp David on 7 September, Tony Blair said proof of a genuine nuclear threat had come in ‘the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this morning, showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapon sites’. Saddam had killed his ...”

“... Roy Jenkins or the Americans Telford Taylor (later a Nuremberg prosecutor) and William Bundy (a Kennedy security adviser). Never a communist, he felt emotional solidarity with the Soviet Union as an ally and was indignant if anybody criticised Soviet actions (‘Oh, the Poles!’). Sisman doesn’t ask the question, but it would be interesting to know if ...”

“... 1932 and raised in Pennsylvania, a child of the Depression, Updike reached prominence during the Kennedy era as American literature’s princely elf, his Jiminy Cricket nose peering down with amusement, his tall, gangly frame having the lanky assurance of someone preparing to sink a basket from the free throw line. (The scrape of sneakers on the basketball ...”

“... clearest example of club culture’s thrilled addiction to clandestine activity. When Jacqueline Kennedy was pictured in newspapers dancing the Twist, its street credibility dissolved. Dance halls and discotheques – like pop music in general – gain little energy from the patronage of high society but have always relied on the enthusiasm of the young, the ...”

“... Portillo, for his part, has significant support on the Left of the Party. Tony Blair and Charles Kennedy would no doubt prefer Portillo, and at the moment, the Euro remains a real obstacle to Clarke’s leadership, unless the Party can formally agree to differ on Europe, as Labour sensibly did in 1975. Which leaves Portillo as the most realistic ...”

“... Ellison like to make lists of the amazing prodigies that flowed to him from his single novel. David Remnick, writing in the New Yorker in 1994, noted the ‘National Book Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, a place in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a position at New York University as ...”

“... Bloom objects to the singing of Kathleen Kearney, the name is a modification of that of Olive Kennedy, who appeared on a concert programme with Joyce in 1902.’ Another: ‘the name of Mrs Purefoy, whose labour pains end in the “Oxen of the Sun” episode with the birth of a boy, comes appropriately enough from Dr R. Damon Purefoy, in 1904 Dublin’s ...”

“... time and ought to have grown out of such silliness, another notable casualty of which was Jackie Kennedy, with whom Adlai Stevenson asked the cast of Beyond the Fringe to supper in New York in 1963. They went and I didn’t. Never spelling it out to myself, I clung far too long to the notion that shyness was a virtue and not, as I came too late to see, a ...”

“... the operation that remained, there was almost no first-hand reporting. One freelance journalist, David Divine, made three trips in a small boat that was rescuing British troops, and the Royal Navy took a Pathé newsreel reporter-cum-cameraman; otherwise the BBC (and British newspapers) relied on the Ministry of Information. The consequences were a mixture of ...”