“... most extraordinary chocolate-maker the world has ever seen!’ For many years no outsider has set foot in the factory. Plagued by industrial espionage, Mr Wonka discharged his entire work-force and has apparently replaced them by a scab troop of midgets – ‘apparently’, because these homuncules, no more than knee high, never set ...”

“... Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and translations fill three thick volumes, his early newspaper columns for the Guardian and the Observer have been reprinted, and he is well launched into the second phase ...”

“... cannot expect Lobby journalists to allow themselves to be perceived as part of a campaign. Paul Foot of the Mirror writes as pungently as anyone in modern journalism, but he has a weekly column to sustain, and Robert Maxwell is by no means as anxious about the fate of the Belgrano as he is about the costs of the Falklands, or the welfare of the Polish ...”

“... How the Police Try to Suppress Protest (Verso, £18.99) the criminal defence solicitor Matt Foot and the documentary filmmaker Morag Livingstone argue that the pivotal moment was in January 1983, when the Conservative home secretary William Whitelaw introduced the Public Order Manual of Tactical Options and Related Matters, a classified handbook drawn ...”

“... When he came to write his autobiography, the biographer Michael Holroyd decided to restrict himself to what he calls ‘a good walk-on part’, assigning the leading roles to his family. Avowedly happier with the lives of others than with his own, he remains as close as the circumstance permits to the condition of invisible watcher ...”

“... of Corfu. There are several different versions of Mosley’s political career. Fellow politicians, Michael Foot and Richard Crossman among them, took the view that, like themselves, he was interested in power but that, unlike them, unlike Foot and Crossman at any rate, he was too impatient to wait his turn. For ...”

“... in and out of rooms like a teenager, closing doors behind her by athletically throwing out a foot; but she can also age ten years in a single close-up when she looks worried. In Holiday (1938) she is accused of having the ideas and attitudes of a person of 17 – we don’t know the age of her character and Hepburn was 31 – and promptly takes this as a ...”

“... Writing is the great Western ritual of self-individuation and each of the twins, scarcely a foot apart on their bunk beds, filled their diaries with a second-by-second account of life in that tiny bedroom, until, as Marjorie Wallace puts it in a nice phrase, ‘reality lay somewhere exhausted between their furious perceptions.’ In these frenzied ...”

“... He is deeply shocked, refuses to shake the man’s hand, and marches off, vowing never to ‘set foot in this house again’. This is still the realm of ugly farce. But then the next day his friend apologises for himself and his sister and his parents, saying they all understand that Lucien was acting ‘out of conviction’. Lucien is delighted, feels like ...”

“... Which is just what happened, so we’ve always been told, to the French at Crécy.In his new book, Michael Livingston argues that we have got nearly everything about Crécy wrong. The standard story has been told many times by historians and by novelists, including by Bernard Cornwell twenty years ago in Harlequin. (Cornwell has written a generous foreword to ...”

“... on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in trying to resolve them in their present manifestations. There is no way of ...”

“... breaks, Sofia Coppola, Alain de Botton, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Tracey Emin, exercise videos, foot spas, Ikea, improving the value of your property, Boris Johnson, Kabbalah, lastminute.com, Live8, loft-living, loyalty cards, the Oscars, paninis, Tony Parsons, Harold Pinter’s anti-war poetry, poledancing lessons, the property ladder, Queen musicals, sex ...”

“... picked the flaccid Wilson, the much-creased figure of Jim Callaghan or the stooping, stick-waving Foot. A bit of deconstruction suggested this was all a blind, that Labour had just had a Welsh boyo and an Edinburgh lawyer as leaders, neither of whom had made it. That was quite enough Scots, Picts and people from the periphery. The really important thing was ...”

“... the DPP’s office. It was drafted by the man in charge of the Ward case at the DPP’s office, Mr Michael Bibby. Bibby later told the Court of Appeal he had discussed the letter with the police before he sent it, but could not remember or name the officer he talked to. Earlier this year, I interviewed Mr Bourke for the Channel Four programme, Street Legal. Mr ...”

“... when the British realised the depth of his commitment to a united Ireland). Arthur Griffiths and Michael Collins believed the exclusion of the North was a minor matter, which could be dealt with later. They did not believe a six-county state could survive for long. So they sat round the table and argued interminably about petty matters of legality and ...”