“... of Robin’s unconcealed antipathy.’ Cook’s other antipathies are noted, against Bob Cryer, John Prescott and Roy Hattersley: ‘Try as I may, I cannot remember what the agony was all about.’ His failed ambitions are mulled over. After John Smith’s death he considered his options and decided he did not have enough ...”

“... course of the week. The majority’s loyalties remained with the Home Rule party and its leader, John Redmond. Ever since Parnell had been hailed ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’ in the 1880s, the majority of nationalists had supported the parliamentary campaign for Home Rule, hoping that Westminster could be persuaded or cajoled into devolving ...”

“... a scene peopled by Apocalyptic and Neo-Romantic poetasters, mostly, with Edith Sitwell and Roy Campbell as potential allies, Geoffrey Grigson lurking threateningly in the wings and T.S. Eliot a very distant god. The former Muriel Camberg joined this cast in 1944 after a stint in southern Africa, where she’d ended a short marriage to the unstable if ...”

“... the Liberal Party of Herbert Asquith. Further schisms followed. The Liberal Nationals, under Sir John Simon, joined the National Government of 1931 and continued for the next thirty years co-operating closely with the Conservatives. Under the Woolton-Teviot Agreement of 1947 the Liberal Nationals changed their name, confusingly, to the National Liberals, and ...”

“... if we were some sort of archaeological dig’. All ambitious politicians primp in some fashion. John Edwards, one of Hillary’s rivals for the Democratic nomination, was recently in trouble for allegedly paying between $400 and $1000 for a haircut. As a woman, however, she faces more sustained and malicious pressure in regard to her appearance, a subject ...”

“... sinfulness, until Jesus finally shows mercy and lets her in. In Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), John Dryden rendered ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ in contemporary English, ‘not daring … to adventure on her prologue, because ’tis too licentious’. Voltaire took the opposite approach: when he reworked Dryden’s version in the 1760s, he made it even ...”

“... was a determined outsider, like Henry Williamson and like his friends, Wyndham Lewis and Roy Campbell. They were all writers who were never quite fashionable in their own lifetimes and not likely to be in the future. All of them held cantankerous, right-wing opinions. There were aspects of Fascism which Aldington admired and he was complacently ...”

“... Callaghan is another matter. Harry Wharton, a former MI5 operative named by the Labour MP Dale Campbell-Savours as having played a part in the destabilisation campaign (though Mr Wharton fiercely denies this), has not unreasonably pointed out that he was given the CBE on Callaghan’s recommendation and that if credence were lent to the allegations made by ...”

“... at his fanciful plots. Standardised in the mid-century US, in Astounding magazine, edited by John W. Campbell, Hard SF advertises consumer goods like personal robots and flying cars. It valorises space travel that culminates in successful (if difficult) contact with the alien life assumed to be strewn throughout the ...”

“... after the defeat of Napoleon, the young Grand Duke Nicholas had come to England. Lady Charlotte Campbell found him ‘devilish handsome’, while others, less frivolously, thought that he might one day put Russia on the Western path of enlightenment. Alas, when Nicholas succeeded as tsar in 1825, he dashed liberal hopes, hanging the Decembrist ...”

“... she gives away her social origins by her choice of intensifier. When the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell said the line onstage in 1914 she tested the tolerance of London theatregoers to the limit: they paused, then laughed uproariously. A swear word became known as ‘a Pygmalion word’. ‘Swearing’ in English covers two distinct but interconnected ...”

“... militants are Malcolm Evans, Alan Brown, Alaric Jacob, Bill Alexander, Robert Stradling, Beatrix Campbell, Deirdre Beddoe, Stephen Sedley, Lynette Hunter, Andy Croft, Stuart Hall, Antony Easthope and Christopher Norris. The attacks are now commonplace. Raymond Williams and other writers have been making them for several years. What they amount to is ...”

“... and couldn’t tell anyone about it, until she eventually met a woman called Robin who worked for John Lewis and they moved in together. She had fallen in love for the first time aged six – with a fair-haired girl called Melvina – but it was only when she arrived in London to find work as a secretary that she was able to acknowledge, in limited ...”

“... in this drama: the Imagists – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell – as well as scores more who had a stake in the continuing vitality of literature, including Yeats, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The writers, clustered in clubs or ‘gangs’, wanted to ...”

“... would be prime minister and football would reclaim its place at the centre of national life. Then John Major won, and two months later England were dumped out of Euro ’92 by Sweden. The Sun put the England manager, Graham Taylor, on the back page with a turnip for a head. In 1994 England failed to qualify for the World Cup. The most important managers in ...”