“... manuscripts were filched. The Shakespeare essays, written over 27 years (the latest, a review of Harold Brooks’s edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, appeared in this paper in October 1979), share these characteristics. The racy manner almost prevents one questioning the confidence with which we are told Shakespeare or the Archbishop of Canterbury would ...”

“... speaks in these lines,’ and so on. Spender was not bashful about building on his success. As Harold Nicolson, who also helped his career, observed: ‘He is absolutely determined to become a leading writer.’ Being a ‘leading writer’, not merely a writer, mattered enormously to the young Spender, and this role required more than just writing. The ...”

“... ship had even left dock: We paraded 85 blocks down 5th ave today and were reviewed by President Wilson. About 75,000 were in line and we were ye star attraction. I was made a sergeant in ye squadron and led the 2nd Platoon out in the middle of the avenue all by myself and saluted Ye Great Woodrow. I felt lonesome. It was a Red Cross march but Hemingway ...”

“... title of a collection of essays edited by Miles Taylor. Briggs became a dominating voice in the Wilson and Callaghan years of Labour government, a time not only of the notorious ‘white heat of technology’ but of huge expansion and transformative innovation in higher and further education. Unlike other academic historians, he actually changed the ...”

“... writing about books for the New Yorker and accruing what the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, described as a ‘mountain of indebtedness’. ‘Her Constant Reader,’ he insisted, ‘did more than anything to put the magazine on its feet, or its ear, or wherever it is today.’Parker approached books in the same way as she had plays. That ...”

“... Estragon – Eric and Ernie are much funnier – but to put them into the same frame as Albert and Harold of Steptoe and Son, Oscar and Felix of The Odd Couple, or Arthur Wilson and George Mainwaring of Dad’s Army is to see that the comedy is the result of a relationship rather than the brittle patter of variety ...”

“... Nattke in order to outvote the happy band of brothers; another tactic was to give a Note to John Wilson, the general secretary of Nattke, telling him to keep his men in order. That’s what union leaders are for, aren’t they? Reading Goodwin’s book, Sir Peter also discovered how often and how bitterly he had complained about his bad press: he supposes he ...”

“... sectarian violence in Belfast forced hundreds of (mostly Catholic) families to leave their homes. Harold Wilson’s decision to send in the army – nominally on a mission to protect civilians, but really in support of the ‘civil power’ whose writ no longer ran in Derry – changed the parameters of reporting for the BBC and other media outlets. With ...”

“... field’s core concepts (realism, liberal internationalism) back to Thucydides or Machiavelli or Wilson is, Vitalis insists, a post-1945 invention. Instead, at the moment of its American birth, ‘international relations meant race relations.’ Races, not states or nations, were considered humanity’s foundational political units; ‘race war’ – not ...”

“... were attempts to bring the CIA to heel. In 1953, for example, the US secretary of defence, Charles Wilson, issued a memo stating that all experiments involving volunteers required their consent, in compliance with the Nuremberg Code. But this clearly wasn’t going to fly with the men in charge of finding ways to force individuals to provide information ...”

“... him hard to read. ‘You keep your cards close up against your belly,’ his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, complained. ‘You never put them on the table.’ Roosevelt played off one adviser against another as a matter of course. ‘Never let your left hand know what your right is doing,’ he told Henry Morgenthau, his treasury secretary and a close ...”

“... Aeschylus’ rival Phrynichus was particularly noted for his choreographies, or learn from Peter Wilson in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy that the shawm (aulos) which always accompanied a performance came in various shapes and sizes depending on the musical context (the ‘wedding shawm’, for example, consisted of one ‘male’ and one ...”

“... in 1967, Attlee began to be missed and appreciated. As the Labour Party ran slowly downhill under Wilson, Callaghan and Foot, Attlee shuffled uphill to join the immortals. Comparisons between past and present told heavily in Attlee’s favour, and the golden age of 1945 took its place in Labour mythology. Both Left and Right of the Party looked back to 1945 ...”

“... but no match for Leavis’s dismissive account of Shelley in Revaluation (1936). Herbert Read, G.Wilson Knight, Frederick Pottle and many other defenders argued that Shelley’s poetry is sustained by the coherence of its imagery, and that the work as a whole shows an extremely intelligent mind fully in touch with the philosophy and science available to ...”

“... Heath was never a wholehearted believer in ‘Selsdon Man’ – the phrase was a nifty minting of Harold Wilson’s. All he was looking for was a distinct and attractive contrast to Labour’s flounderings, and so he promised a ‘quiet revolution’, in terms which understandably convinced his right wing that he had come over to their way of ...”