“... sharp cut-off point. What he has to say about Administrations up to 1964 is fresh and fascinating; Wilson’s Administration of 1964-70 was so voluminously covered by press leaks at the time and by endless diaries and memoirs soon afterwards that the official documents have nothing new to tell us, and the Public Record Office is still closed for the ...”

“... title of a collection of essays edited by Miles Taylor. Briggs became a dominating voice in the Wilson and Callaghan years of Labour government, a time not only of the notorious ‘white heat of technology’ but of huge expansion and transformative innovation in higher and further education. Unlike other academic historians, he actually changed the ...”

“... has been happening. In the first two decades after the war, the cream of the Oxford PPE School (Wilson, Healey, Jenkins, Crossman, Crosland etc) tended to gravitate to the Labour benches, lending the Party an intellectual authority which was crucial to its appeal beyond the traditional working class. Whether or not such men were any good in government, they ...”

“... age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of bad luck too. She was rammed by a warship in 1911 and limped into port with ...”

“... however, Mulhearn scuttled back over the river to Liverpool. His place was filled by Cathy Wilson, who, so it was rumoured, had succeeded in reducing the Labour vote to below the Labour Party membership figure when she contested the Isle of Wight in the 1983 Election. She campaigned on the footing that, being unemployed, she would make a suitable ...”

“... about time the government displayed a no surrender attitude – stand up to them, man!’ Sammy Wilson, the DUP member for East Antrim, agreed and spoke of taking the gloves off in the fight with the ‘blackmailing burghers of Brussels and the cheap political opportunists in Dublin’. ‘No surrender’ was the cry of the Apprentice Boys when they shut ...”

“... to read them. One must acknowledge, however, that Richard Cobb is not Frank Kermode, nor Angus Wilson D.P. Walker. I had come knowing what Britain’s preconceived ideas were: her pragmatism and refusal of abstraction, her solitary traditions and diehard taste for erudition and travail honnête, however ungratifying; knowing, too, that my stock of clichés ...”

“... those along the coast. But ‘nobody can deal with the underlying problems of inner China.’ Michael Bond’s Beyond the Chinese Face is in some ways the perfect foil for Jenner. It is a practical, straightforward pocket guide to social psychology that dissolves the uniqueness of Chinese society. Although it can make sense to talk of ...”

“... But they operate in a void. There is nothing else in the books. This was in the mind of Edmund Wilson when he wrote the formidable essay called ‘Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ We can say only that, within the limitations of her craft, Agatha Christie can, at need, write with a verbal adroitness far exceeding anything that has gone before ...”

“... now been at least 90 biographies. Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens comes just two years after Michael Slater’s excellent Charles Dickens, the first to benefit from the complete 12-volume British Academy Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters and Slater’s own editions of Dickens’s journalism. But Slater is a career Dickensian, not a popular ...”

“... the momentous (insanity) and the everyday offhandedly together. In an anecdotal chapter on Angus Wilson, P.N. Furbank quotes a similar passage from his Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, in which a bossy woman hectors a small boy, ‘so creating a deep psychic trauma that was to cause him to be court-martialled for cowardice many years later in World War Three’. The ...”

“... come to suppose that everything can be done by Notes. When I was a student I appeared in a play by Michael Codron, directed by his friend, Adrian Brown: just before we went on, Codron appeared to give us a Note. ‘Adrian is making this too heavy and Germanic,’ he said. ‘I want it to be light, French, a soufflé.’ This confused us performers and wrecked ...”

“... Oddly, the ‘Hottentot Venus’ was being ridiculed as a freak in London only a little later than Wilson, a black sailor from Boston, was being admired there as a sort of Greek god. Sir Thomas Lawrence found in him the combined perfections of the finest Classical statues, and Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote as enthusiastically about him as he did about the ...”

“... attitudes about elite culture, make the top-down instruction provided with such grumpy relish by Wilson problematic. But the chief reason is that the academy won: it was not writers who changed literary criticism, but academic criticism that changed literary criticism. It made it, precisely, more academic. Theory, metalled with its own unforgiving ...”

“... and drove him to fits of remorse. ‘I hope a letter is not too melodramatic,’ he writes to Michael and Edna Longley, after a perceived early failure to be an advocate for poetry in the North: ‘It is not so much in the hope of redressing any hurt as to allay my own embarrassment and guilt. As usual your attitude has been gracious and gentle in the ...”