“... six and seven amendments per sitting day during the Heath Government. This rose to nine during the Wilson-Callaghan Government, and climbed to 16 a day under Mrs Thatcher. During the final stages of the 1988-89 session their lordships were zipping through an amendment a minute. This is undeniably high productivity – which may have been just what Mrs Thatcher ...”

“... Gollancz started up the Left Book Club. Here were three socialists – Gollancz, John Strachey and Harold Laski – meeting in a restaurant and establishing a publishing venture which would, over ten years, produce and sell six million books, most of them new, and all of them aspiring to a social order where the common interest would prevail. There was at that ...”

“... artists’ – among them Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and Robert Wilson – who kept their sexuality hidden from public view, something White views with antipathy: ‘We openly gay artists had to deal with the dismissive or condescending judgments all around us ...”

“... Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law League, insisting that his paper should be an independent ...”

“... a majority of 1181 votes on a turnout of 47,717. His death reduced the parliamentary majority of Harold Wilson’s government to one seat. Labour’s candidate was Kevin McNamara, a lecturer at Hull College of Commerce and a local party activist. The Conservative candidate was the enthusiastic but inexperienced Toby Jessel.Gott, who had never been to ...”

“... of a literary career. And for the critics, the obverse was true: Lionel Trilling wrote fiction, Harold Rosenberg wrote poetry, Alfred Kazin wrote his memoirs. They weren’t just critics: they were writers. With the rise of mass education after World War Two, the demand for English professors grew, more university presses were established, and increasing ...”

“... but the ranks of inscribed black and white photographs that line the walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a nightmare mix of ...”

“... saw it in New York in 1963, how sophisticated it seemed and how camp. He ends up by asking me, as Harold Wilson once did: ‘Were you one of the original four?’I wonder whether there were any shy, retiring Apostles: ‘Were you one of the original twelve?’Does the Holy Ghost resent God the Father and God the Son being better known (and certainly more ...”

“... known,’ Hardwick remarked, as if piety and intelligence were obviously incongruous qualities. Harold Bloom felt that ‘O’Connor would have bequeathed us even stronger novels and stories, of the eminence of Faulkner’s, if she had been able to restrain her spiritual tendentiousness.’ She was aware that many of her readers felt this way. ‘You ...”

“... On the evening of 10 March 1969, Richard Crossman, Harold Wilson’s new Secretary of State for Social Services (‘SSSS? Impossible!’ Crossman wrote in his diary), reached into one of his three ministerial red boxes to find a long report by a still rather obscure Conservative barrister. Geoffrey Howe had entered Parliament in 1964, only to lose his seat when Wilson increased Labour’s majority from four to 95 in 1966 ...”

“... to support his scepticism at his home institution in the so-called École de Yale. In 1979, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller, all at the time Yale colleagues, put together a kind of manifesto entitled Deconstruction and Criticism. There were certain affinities among the five but the differences were more ...”

“... He complained about his tutors at Oxford. He complained with special vehemence when his uncle Harold, the first Lord Rothermere (Lord Northcliffe had died in 1922, the year King graduated), declined to give him the important job in newspapers that he felt was his due. Instead Rothermere sent him to Scotland to learn the ropes on the Glasgow Record and the ...”

“... you are. Anglophilia showed itself in the magazine’s politics (Thomas Kunkel’s biography of Harold Ross describes him praying for Britain before America’s entry into the war) and its choice of subjects and contributors. Edmund Wilson, reviewing one of Taylor’s novels, adduced it as ‘one more proof that the ...”

“... is Last Word, the obituary programme on Radio 4, and The Archive Hour, which on 7 July was about Harold Macmillan – the Night of the Long Knives. This was terrific stuff both in itself, Macmillan always a treat even when he’s being a showman, but also in pointing up the driving down of standards in politics that has occurred since. Taken together with ...”

“... circulation declined, notwithstanding its 1964 relaunch as the Sun, complete with the new Wilson-era slogan: ‘Born of the age we live in!’ When IPC finally decided to sell the Sun the circulation had fallen from 1.5m to 650,000 copies. After the print unions refused to discuss Robert Maxwell’s offer for the paper, Murdoch stepped in. ‘I am ...”