“... on you. Cimmie: Went to lunch at Maryland today, found Princess Louise, Lady Londesburgh, Jack Wilson ... I tried desperately hard to be friendly and gay. It was the fashion in the Mosleys’ circle for husbands to try to get off with other people’s wives: this was another of the ‘rules of the game’ to which Nicholas Mosley’s title refers. But if ...”

“... newspaper itself was perhaps the best in the world, well financed, brimming with talent and zeal. Harold Evans had taken over as Editor the previous year. Francis Wyndham and I later became close friends but at first he seemed formidable, even a little intimidating. He was already a legend among his contemporaries for his intellectual prowess, which seemed ...”

“... was published fifteen years ago. Aneurin Bevan, Abse said there, was a Freudian case-study; Harold Wilson’s ‘seeming calmness’ a ‘regressive schizoid phenomenon’. The book undoubtedly scored a few (underhand) hits and Anthony Howard called it a ‘revolutionary’ work. In fact, Private Member was pretty modest by comparison with what we ...”

“... an epoch, possibly even the end of a nation.’ But what era feels more remote today than that of Wilson and Heath, the great modernisers for whom modernity failed to arrive? In spirit at least, Churchill has outlived them, taking his place again in British politics as one of the household gods of Mrs Thatcher. Once more his legend influences the ...”

“... earlier positions appear almost unrecognisable. Who, for instance, said the following in 1962 of Harold Macmillan’s stated wish to make Britain a member of the European institutions that had been created by the Treaty of Rome? ‘We must be clear: it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state. I make no apology for ...”

“... Harold Macmillan, Harry Crookshank, Oliver Lyttelton and Bobbety Cranborne all arrived at Eton in 1906, the first two from the affluent middle class and the other two from aristocratic families. Lyttelton went on to Cambridge and the others to Oxford, but they all served in the Grenadier Guards in 1914-18, and all four entered Churchill’s cabinet during the Second World War ...”

“... the University of Salford (one of the former Colleges of Advanced Technology so smiled on in the Harold Wilson/C.P. Snow years) found its budget cut by over 40 per cent. The second key date was 1986, which saw the first Research Assessment Exercise, the brainchild of “Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, then chairman of the UGC. An attempt to measure the ...”

“... difficulty that punctuation modifies metrical rhythm, which is a constituent of meaning. Dover Wilson and W.W. Greg believed that the light, dramatic pointing of the second Quarto Hamlet was both Shakespearean and a valuable guide to delivery. Modern punctuation is logical and syntactic, and therefore essentially different, but this does not mean that it ...”

“... end to one’s life.’ He took no credit for the years in which he, in his earlier incarnation as Harold Macmillan, had told the people that they had never had it so good. The economy had been collapsing steadily since the First World War, and the Second World War had only appeared to shore it up. When the crash became obvious to all, the Labour Government ...”

“... he was, was good at it. His style rapidly dated but he left others to make the real mistakes: Wilson followed his example and over-used television, living by the medium and dying by it. Heath was murdered by it, and we ended up with the Central School of Speech and Drama in power: an actress brilliant at each part she prates: St ...”

“... sport, but in the late Nineties it suddenly looks like the critical craze of the moment. Richard Wilson, for example, published an article in the TLS a few months ago reviving the claim that the young William Shakespeare can be identified with the actor William Shakeshafte who is named in the will of one of Edmund Campion’s Lancashire Catholic disciples in ...”

“... by widespread social change. She certainly wasn’t an obvious choice of minister to set up Harold Wilson’s pet project, the Open University. Lee had thought she was finished after Bevan’s death: ‘Bad sleeps, meaningless days. When to talk and what to say.’ She was drinking at least a bottle of gin a day. ...”

“... on the prompt-book, but is certain he wrote it at first, because of the rules invented by Dover Wilson for the misinterpretation of his handwriting. Surely anyone used to correcting proofs knows that all kinds of mistakes may occur, whereas this bit of pedantry would be quite out of key for Theseus. ‘Mural down’ (Pope) goes quite far enough.As part of a ...”

“... you’re lost. ‘The Dean’ (of Peterhouse, Edward Norman) and ‘the Chancellor’ (of Oxford, Harold Macmillan) are not identified. How many readers will translate ‘My Successor … is not in much favour with your successor … owing to his lack of assiduity in his attendance beneath the portrait of Queen Anne’ into ‘Michael Howard didn’t think ...”

“... derived from the lurid tales of spookery and skulduggery that emerged in the dying days of Harold Wilson’s premiership, when the longstanding suspicion that Wilson was a KGB plant led to rumoured attempts by MI5 and others to undermine him by any means necessary. Even in 1982, these stories seemed to be going ...”