“... He was no longer the man he had been. Harold Lever is portrayed as a man too devoted to playing bridge with the Establishment – his membership of a Labour Cabinet was increasingly inappropriate. I myself disagreed frequently with Harold’s views on macro-economic policy, though perhaps from a point of view even more distasteful to Barbara. But I know of ...”

“... into which German tanks would be unable to pursue partisan fighters, while mapping by General Roy after the ‘45 was a preliminary to driving roads into the Highlands to bring an earlier partisan force – the supporters of Charles Edward Stuart – under control. Roy’s survey can be seen as the beginning of British ...”

“... the soft left in the Parliamentary Labour Party. Now he vaulted over it and challenged not only Roy Jenkins, the old Gaitskellite, but also Michael Foot, the old Bevanite, for the deputy leadership in 1971. The fathers of the other two candidates had been, respectively, a Labour and a Liberal MP; Benn’s father had been both. Rejected nonetheless by his ...”

“... in point, the walls of Derry were completed in 1618. Catholics, ‘a threatening majority’, as Roy Foster describes them in Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (1988), were not allowed to live in the town, so they clustered in the Bogside beyond the walls. On 12 August 1969 the (Protestant) Apprentice Boys held their customary triumphalist march through the streets ...”

“... by peroxide), of burying your feelings lest they betray you.Donald’s best friend, Roy Redgrave, discovered that his father kept a loaded .45 service revolver hidden under his bedside table. Roy knew his father as ‘a happy-go-lucky man’, so why did he feel threatened in his own home? ...”

“... Britain staying in Europe. He has shown great political skill and insight.’ He reports also that Roy Jenkins subsequently conceded, most generously, that he had ‘misunderstood’ Wilson’s handling of the issue. It is true, I now think, that Wilson could not have held the European line, and the Labour Party together, through the years of opposition ...”

“... can we recover a ‘genuine’ Patrick from our long-lost pair of texts? Many have tried. Roy Flechner seeks to unite those efforts in his own way, while also describing the saint’s encrustation of legend; all done for the general reader with commendable economy. Patrick provides some tantalisingly specific details about himself, including the name ...”

“... Baroness James, making a rare visitation to a blighted metropolitan zone, downriver of Tower Bridge, has written a very useful book, a book on which I will be happy to draw for years to come. That was back in 1972. Title? The Maul and the Pear Tree; co-authored by T.A. Critchley of the Police Department at the Home Office, where James then earned her crust as a Principal in the Criminal Policy Department ...”

“... the play has tended to muffle its strangeness. It is the great achievement of the second volume of Roy Foster’s superb biography that it delivers us late Yeats in all his troublesome immediacy. Foster does this not just by cutting across the record with new facts from the archive – itself a considerable feat, given that half a dozen biographers have ...”

“... in reality nurtured by underground skin-industries, and his achievement was to build a credible bridge between the divergent milieux. He did a cover photo for the gay S/M porn magazine Drummer, and it was through this far-left-of-centre gig that he discovered some of his first models. Yet he was hardly alone in traversing libidinal frontiers. For ...”

“... winsome: for example, when Hennessy recalls that the sight of a steam express crossing the Forth Bridge on the opening credits of Six-Five Special had particular resonance for ‘little old trainspotting me’. But he relives very well the innocence and modesty of those years, of which the hard-nosed Sir Kenneth Berrill, later head of Margaret Thatcher’s ...”

“... fix too badly. I agreed to do the polling. Morris is a second cousin of Jules Feiffer and also of Roy Cohn. What a gene-pool, to have produced America’s most mordant radical cartoonist and also its leading fascist closet-case and McCarthyite spear-bearer. Morris doesn’t mention Feiffer at all in this book, but he does tell a few wide-boy stories about ...”

“... their lives: How may we do? I fear me they will live. DUMAINE: Go place some men upon the bridge With bows and darts to shoot at them they see, And sink them in the river as they swim. GUISE: ‘Tis well advised, Dumaine; go see it straight be done. [Exit DUMAINE] And in the meantime, my lord, could we devise To get those pedants from the King ...”

“... of 1906: The accursed power which stands on Privilege (And goes with Women, and Champagne, and Bridge) Broke – and Democracy resumed her reign: (Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne). As the casualty lists lengthened, so did the card games and the PM’s drives through the Thames Valley with one of his ...”

“... Tye argues, Kennedy’s extraordinary appeal in his final years lay precisely in his ability to bridge gaps, between urban workers and suburban professionals, between rich and poor, between white and black and Latino. By his willingness to change and to transcend the standard political categories, Tye’s Kennedy could have become America’s ‘high priest ...”