“... as a male concubine to this Eastern Circe.’ That is the sort of career break the Flashman of George MacDonald Fraser could have taken in his stride, but Rohmer’s males have ‘a marked streak of puritanism’ in them, saying things like ‘I had never been a woman’s man’ or ‘I was never a squire of dames.’ Their ability to keep their minds ...”

“... most of the pre-1931 leadership of the Labour Party had done the same thing – for a Lloyd George Liberal and a minister in Lloyd George’s Government it was not only odd, it was singular. Thus he was a minister under Lloyd George (1916-21), ...”

“... said to that?’ We know the answer: ‘Not the same thing a bit!’ Another minister of religion, George MacDonald, obliquely got to grips in his fiction with certain doctrinal problems which agitated him, and ended by supplying for his readers a good dose of ‘spiritual nourishment’, even if he couldn’t tell the difference between his grandmother ...”

“... figures have been forgotten, or, in the case of the party’s first prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, disowned. The Labour left, then and since, thought the new administration was too timid and had failed to promote socialism. The centre and right of the party felt that the experience of 1924 had confirmed the dangers of taking office without a ...”

“... feature came to be the provision of music, which is fascinatingly discussed by Stanford Lehmberg. George Herbert went twice a week to Salisbury Cathedral, ‘and at his return, he would say that his time spent in prayers and cathedral music elevated his soul and was heaven on earth.’ Cathedral choirs sang the difficult music of Tallis, Byrd and ...”

“... is OK now, he says, he can rest on his laurels in his handsome study in Connecticut, reading George MacDonald Fraser and Patrick O’Brian, and he’s always ‘got some historical work on the go’: Nelson, World War Two, the ancient Romans. Before the settling down, though, back in 1973, while Richards was in London, Anita Pallenberg was living in ...”

“... rain on the Isle of Skye, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson found a welcome in the house of Allan MacDonald at Kingsburgh. Dr Johnson had developed a nasty cold; Boswell was wet and thirsty and delighted to get indoors. ‘There was a comfortable parlour,’ he wrote in his journal in the autumn of 1773, ‘with a good fire, and a dram of admirable Hollands ...”

“... of personal failures of character and judgment at the critical moments: Asquith’s in 1915-16, MacDonald’s in 1930-31 and Chamberlain’s in 1938-39. But the influences at work were of course a great deal more complicated than that. The explanation of what did (or didn’t) happen lies, as McKibbin rightly says, somewhere in the relationship between ...”

“... talents were other than those of a Parliamentary chairman; Arthur Henderson was dull; Ramsay MacDonald was both great orator and skilled tactician, though his critics within the Party were numerous well before the First World War broke out. During that war, a number of Labour men served in government (not, of course, ...”

“... in their power to maintain a two-party monopoly. This, after all, was the situation in 1924, when MacDonald’s first Labour Government refused an agreement with the Liberals and yet survived for nine months although the Conservatives alone could have defeated it. Baldwin launched an anti-Labour campaign in the country while in the Commons sufficient ...”

“... Chamberlain) have statues in the lobby of the House of Commons: Balfour, Asquith, Lloyd George, Churchill and Attlee. The inclusion of Joseph Chamberlain seems rather odd unless it be meritorious to wreck first the Liberal and then the Conservative Party. But let that pass. Now it is proposed to put up a statue of Stanley Baldwin, three times prime ...”

“... relocating unemployed men and their families to the coast. The inspiration behind the scheme was George Lansbury, the subject of John Shepherd’s biography, a book as meticulous as it is generous. It is nonetheless timely: just as the prison service has brown-filled this pleasant site, so, too, New Labour has trampled on the radical socialism of which ...”

“... sense whatever.’ And the Pre-Raphaelite line continues, right the way up to The Blue Flower, via George MacDonald, whose Phantastes inspired generations of grot-and-goblin writers, and who was the translator of the Hymns to the Night. In fact, MacDonald was the only English-speaking writer who ‘really ...”

“... the world is turned if not upside down then round through many degrees. In the story of the Macdonald sisters Stanley Baldwin and Kipling are, for most of the time, children, little seen or heard. Ruskin is a recurring nuisance. We sympathise with Georgiana Macdonald, an independent woman tied by an early marriage to ...”

“... fads and the highbrows who prattled on about them. At a meeting of Edwardian Fabians attended by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, Attlee whispered to his brother: ‘Do we have to grow a beard to join this show?’ The confident pre-1914 left, he later reflected, had been too rigid in its scientific approach to social problems and altogether ‘too ...”