“... 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 ...”

“... of money, public adulation and staggering self-belief. ‘I really believe,’ he wrote to Edmund Wilson, whom he had met at Princeton, that ‘no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation.’ But he was already anticipating his later failure. ‘I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings ...”

“... delay’. In his justly celebrated Arden Shakespeare edition of the play, published in 1982, Harold Jenkins looks at the vast literature that has already appeared on the subject of ‘delay’ in Hamlet, and reminds the reader that many critics have found it an exhausted subject that should be put aside. Ruth Nevo, for example, in 1972 dismissed the ...”

“... to Bloomsbury tastes emerged at Sissinghurst in Kent, where Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson, found the remains of a great courtyard house that had once played host to Elizabeth I. It was already in ruins when Horace Walpole saw it in 1752 and all that now survived was one low range of buildings and a single great tower. Restoring it was ...”

“... cooked up his gris-gris under the musical supervision of another New Orleans musician, Harold Battiste, during time carved out of Sonny & Cher’s recording schedule at the Gold Star studio in Los Angeles in the summer of 1967. The results were released the following year as a notably short long-player, Gris-Gris, credited to Dr John, the Night ...”

“... The fictiveness of the real is a favourite theme with Americans, from Wallace Stevens to Harold Robbins. They are afraid they live in a world they have made up, and made up badly, so that a soap opera, for example, may be seen not as an escape but as a secret verdict, a last metaphor for a bungled invention. Vidal knows this very well, and speaks, in ...”

“... the greatest English novelist of his generation. Certainly Graham Greene, Henry Green and Angus Wilson thought so, although they and not he won the worldly honours Waugh would dearly have loved. On the other hand, that redoubtable holder of the Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he have nominated? Orwell, Elizabeth ...”

“... and dogmatic politics’ and as a hindrance to ‘an expression of the public will’. Harold Laski’s Parliamentary Government in England, published in 1938, pleaded for ‘a government that can govern’ and ‘a stable executive with sufficient authority to drive an important and substantial programme through the House of Commons in the ...”

“... research himself. There is an embarrassingly well-written account, rather like an early Angus Wilson story, of a terrible Christmas package holiday in a Bournemouth hotel. As ‘Raban’ and a very temporary ‘Mrs Raban’ consort and occasionally cavort with their culturally ‘dispossessed’ fellow guests one feels much as they must have done, while ...”

“... them, its adversaries should be hugely entertained and encouraged. The old Arch-Druid himself, Mr Harold Macmillan, appeared on television the other night and gave a few lessons on the maintenance of Ancient British solidarity. Tens of thousands of Polish workers on their knees were, he suggested, the right sort of example to follow. That was unity for ...”

“... into her own vision of ‘all this fiddle’, as graceful in her reading of Stevens or Cummings or Harold Monro, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (‘if not purely modern, properly within the new movement’) as in her considered praise of the millionaire poet Scofield Thayer: ‘a new Victorian – reflective, bi-visioned, and rather wilfully ...”

“... thought her more a manager than a leader. Tony Crosland, her chief at education during the first Wilson government, was frustrated by her tendency to get mired in detail. Contrast this with the record of Barbara Castle, Labour’s top woman at a string of second-rank ministries a few years earlier. Like Williams, Castle never held the great offices of ...”