“... the behaviour of his predecessor in the run-up to the Iraq War; and the best-known Mark Fisher was Tony Blair’s former arts minister, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central – it had recently been revealed in the local paper that he’d claimed parliamentary expenses for items including a face-painting set, a packet of Fun Chunky Crayons and two bottles ...”

“... for Universal Credit or child tax credits; Ken Livingstone has Alzheimer’s. Their shared mentor, Tony Benn, is long dead. Beckett is an astute chronicler of his subjects’ fortunes over the decades, and a fair-minded referee of their battles with Labour’s centrists. His story begins with Benn’s self-reinvention as a tribune of the people in the wake of ...”

“... less delusional, as fellow patients become internees brutalised by state repression:      Tony, dying from self-imposed malnutrition and not from any kind of certifiable brain disease, and who was from a village sacked by the                          shock troops of this present Government, and not even on a proper glucose ...”

“... you ever die, I’m going to get buried in the casket with you.’ This Donne-ish sentiment Tony Ciccone found ‘really disgusting’. Poor man! His disgust threshold will have to rise. When he reaches 59 his daughter will drag him onto a stage to sing ‘Happy Birthday’, her navel exposed and a pattern of laces, like evil stitching, covering her ...”

“... Viscount Stansgate to begin the spectacular exercise in downward social mobility which allowed Mr Tony Benn to become the arbiter of leftwing politics in the Seventies. That the second Viscount Hailsham might similarly choose to resume the political career of Mr Quintin Hogg was already on the cards. But Howard’s journalistic coup was to broaden the ...”

“... career, she and her friends tell off a famous director: ‘we will not tolerate your bullying, white slave-master tactics’ they inform him. Then she gets on Star Trek, in an important role but, as some have pointed out, not an executive one. For Nichols, though, it doesn’t matter whether Uhura should have been captain or not; the important thing is ...”

“... peeping Tom and a determined fantasist; now he became an accomplished stalker, breaking into the tony Hancock Park homes of unattainable co-eds, rifling their knicker drawers and popping pills from the family medicine cabinets. Pills and weed led to a fervid over the counter speed habit, and Ellroy lost another seven years to the Benzedrine-soaked wads torn ...”

“... talking), runs slap against the plywood barrier. As a precaution, the authorities have painted a white line around the former boating lake in Victoria Park, along with a helpful notice: CAUTION WATER. You can’t be too careful of this stuff, this alien medium. Comb off the algae carpet, the scum, and prepare to airlift in a dune or two, with deckchairs and ...”

“... the National Health Service. Nor am I making mock of the modern Labour Party from some pure-white ivory tower. I simply suggest that if Neil Kinnock has changed since he became leader, the Mark II version is actually a lot closer to the historic nature of the Labour Party than was the Mark I version. If it were not so, why the proliferation of leftist ...”

“... and Charlie were driving £2,631,684 in mail bags to Leather-slade Farm on 8 August 1963, with Tony Bennett singing ‘The Good Life’ on the radio. When Buster Edwards hanged himself last year and I rang Bruce Reynolds for a comment (an explanation, if there can ever be such a thing) he referred me to Alvarez and The Savage God. Reynolds was always the ...”

“... Turner’s credit even he was not comfortable with the scenario of the rich do-gooding white man taking in the poor little black child,’ Not Sidney explains. ‘Television was polluted with that model, and it didn’t take a genius to understand that something was wrong with it. My situation was somewhat different as I was in fact extremely ...”

“... of coverage.’ In Regent’s Park rows of old ladies were sitting in the rose garden. In their white skirts and sandals, they had an air of seen-it-all about them, pointing to beds of flowers and thinking nothing of cellophane. And maybe they had seen it all: by the boating pond, fixed to the bandstand, was a plaque engraved with yet more London ...”

“... owe everything to memories of my mother and her struggle.’ The American cover has a black and white photograph of a boy and a woman in bed, their foreheads touching in a maternal embrace. (On the British cover, a boy sits on a post that looks not unlike a cross.) Much of the story is excruciating, and it is in a long line of books with trauma as the main ...”

“... of the Thirties. Why has the Opposition done so badly? Two recent books afford a clue.* Tony Benn’s diaries are full of interest, in many ways the more so because we already have such plentiful diaristic accounts of the 1964-70 Labour Government. (Benn reveals, incidentally, that Harold Wilson promised that he would publish posthumously the real ...”

“... appearing as a peevish young icon slouched on a chair with a moody, come-hither expression, a pure white cat on his lap and his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more ...”