“... British state.3 This history has its own familiar antiheroes: MacDonald, Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan, Kinnock, Blair, Brown, Miliband. That this is to list nearly all of Labour’s leaders is part of the point. (What is not so frequently mentioned is that much of the conservatism of the Labour Party when it came to the empire, monarchy, the ...”

“... he says: ‘though the rambling narration has been denounced by both Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson, the story is as precise as a Swiss watch. Everything fits, but the reader has to wind it up.’ I doubt if the metaphor is well chosen. Such a story is more like a Post-Impressionist painting, for which we have to get our eye in and learn to ...”

“... of Roger Ackroyd. Or as Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) frequently proclaimed, paraphrasing Edmund Wilson: ‘who gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in which he specialised, glossed the Jamesian school as ‘pretentious escapist crap for the well-heeled middle-class market’. A ...”

“... omnipotence has survived into the digital age. Politicians apparently wish it to be true. Harold Wilson was obsessed with the idea that the Daily Mirror could undo him; Neil Kinnock in his defeat accepted that it was ‘The Sun Wot Won It’; and more recent governments convinced themselves that the Daily Mail under ...”

“... of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles. No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald Richie. ‘Almost everything I do, everything that is known about me, is connected to this country,’ he wrote. ‘To be a person so intent upon describing a ...”

“... showed a good deal more confidence, and their work transcends mere period interest. In Angus Wilson’s first novel, Hemlock and After (1952), fellow gay writers and readers found their world described with a liberating candour and naturalness new to British literary fiction; Parker excerpts a climactic scene in which the married but homosexual writer ...”

“... forms of racial conflict. At the same time, America was preparing to enter the Great War. Wood-row Wilson lay half-paralysed in the White House; the socialist leader Eugene Debs was kicking his heels in an Atlanta prison cell; and an assortment of anti-war socialists and anarchist bombers were keeping J. Edgar Hoover and the Justice Department busy. In a ...”

“... narrative of progress or development had been there from the start. Back in 1937 Edmund Wilson had complained that ‘his technique has seemed to mature, but he himself has not grown up.’ Auden would have resisted the logic implied by that ‘but’; he was fond of Nietzsche’s definition of maturity in Beyond Good and Evil – ‘to have ...”

“... had exhausted the poetic impulse. Nothing was left for us to do.’ The Chicago poet and editor Paul Carroll, born in 1926, wrote: To a young poet the scene in American verse in the late 1940s and early 1950s seemed much like walking down 59th Street in New York for the first time. Elegant and sturdy hotels and apartment buildings stand in the enveloping ...”

“... Both had married young to older intellectual powerhouse grumps – McCarthy to Edmund Wilson, who locked her in a room to force her to write, Sontag to Philip Rieff, the sociologist she met as a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as Partisan ...”

“... for the child in this cell. Thermidor, the fall of Robespierre, brought no immediate relief. Paul Barras – ex-nobleman, late Jacobin terrorist, future member of the Directory – came and expressed shock. He asked for the cell to be cleaned up, but no one did it. The times had been uncertain for five years. Maybe tomorrow there would be a ...”

“... head bearing solemn witness to ‘The Adulterous Society’. Prefaced with a quotation from Paul Tillich and with a high-gloss finish (‘his phallus sheer silver’ etc), Couples lent itself usefully to brow-furrowed editorial ponderings on the sexual revolution and its social tremors, unlike the exploding confetti and frantic wrist action of Philip ...”

“... ruins, the exploration of geographical and social wastelands. Some, following in the footsteps of Paul Theroux’s Kingdom by the Sea, see the Northern towns as horrors. Others, indignant at the haemorrhage of jobs and skills, chart the progress of disindustrialisation. Ian Jack’s Before the Oil Ran Out and Robert Chesshyre’s The Return of a Native ...”

“... jokes about Clinton are always the same joke. ‘When he comes to a fork in the road,’ writes Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, ‘he takes it.’ He wants to have his dozen Big Macs and eat them too. And so forth. (I myself have contributed a one-liner: ‘Why did Bill Clinton cross the road? Because he wanted to get to the middle.’) In ...”