“... him pushed him out of his Tory imperialism towards a form of socialism. Together with his brother Tom, he joined the Fabian Society in October 1907; then in January 1908 – a much more crucial step – he joined the Stepney ILP. The 16 branch members were all trade-unionists, so Attlee himself joined the National Union of Clerks. For seven years, up to the ...”

“... great towns and cities’. Other socialists, including his fellow Scots and near contemporaries Tom Johnston and John Wheatley, worked as MacDonald did as journalists or publishers, but tended to be involved in campaigning publications, Johnston as the editor of the socialist weekly Forward and Wheatley as the writer and publisher of socialist books. While ...”

“... and constriction, beating, as he put it in ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’, ‘the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in ...”

“... his man won the Westminster St George’s by-election against Beaverbrook’s candidate, Stanley Baldwin complained that Rothermere and Beaverbrook’s newspapers were ‘engines of propaganda for the constantly changing policies, personal wishes, personal likes and dislikes of two men … What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and ...”

“... a clergyman; his oldest sister, Mary, served as a missionary in South Africa; and his brother Tom, a fervent admirer of William Morris, joined the Christian Social Union and volunteered in a boys’ home in Hoxton founded by F.D. Maurice, the pioneering Christian socialist. A high-minded Christianity governed the choices of Attlee’s siblings, and it ...”

“... translation from Anacreon or his imitators, then a few poems to the king or to Julia or Prewdence Baldwin (his maid at Dean Prior), then a poem that splices sections of Martial together with Horace or a moral saw from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and then a randy epigram on a girl with bad teeth or a thief who pinches the napkins off your table ...”

“... know that a snap election is never risk-free: those called in 1923 and 1974 rebounded on Stanley Baldwin and Edward Heath (though the first snap election of the 20th century, in 1900, delivered a huge majority for the Conservatives). This one too may not deliver all she hopes: it’s possible that the Liberal Democrats will do well, and that some of the more ...”

“... elaborate games that consumed their attention for weeks on end. Or non-elaborate ones: Susan Baldwin and her friends ‘used to spend hours playing a really simple game … putting a lolly stick on the ground and lying down on the roundabout and going round and round really fast and you had to pick it up’. Some of them knocked on doors and asked to ...”

“... as ‘a NAACP-type negro’. In the film he is played as the grovelling and resentful Uncle Tom Malcolm kept saying his black opponents were. When King is allowed to speak in the film it is in a piece of newsreel footage taken at the time of Malcolm’s death. King is patently insincere in his regret, or perhaps just thinking about something else. In ...”

“... who could have featured with minimal anachronism at a 17th-century witch trial, and Screaming Tom Driberg, no nicer but in quite different ways, promoting fellatio like the gospel? Both were horrid, both useful and both, if not always by advertence, amusing. The amiable cynicism with which Beaverbrook wore his Presbyterianism could accommodate balancing ...”

“... prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, remained in the job until 1935, when he was replaced by Stanley Baldwin, who retired in 1937 and was succeeded by his chancellor of the exchequer, Neville Chamberlain. Soon after Hitler came to power in 1933 it became clear that he would join Hirohito’s Japan and Mussolini’s Italy in a policy of restless territorial ...”

“... the other night, where were Tennyson, Browning, Anthony Trollope, Lord Houghton, Lord Stanley, Tom Taylor, Fitzjames Stephen ... with all of whom I had a pleasant gossip.’ With all of them? But even on such a loquacious evening he still spared a thought for ‘how much better worthy of such company dear Daniel would have been.’ His own receptions, held ...”

“... adventurer, a Hornblower, a Scarlet Pimpernel, that favourite reading matter of mine as a child. Baldwin Wake Walker was his full name, and he had entered the British navy in 1812, when he was ten, was posted to the West Indies, and made a lieutenant by the age of 18. He was destined thereafter to spend far more time travelling and fighting in the British ...”

“... an obstinate and narrow-minded man who, when things went wrong, always put the blame on others – Baldwin, Hitler, anyone but himself. In my book on the origins of the Second World War, I slipped towards the same mistake as Bright, and gave the impression of excusing Hitler. I didn’t mean to. All I wanted to say was that he planned much less and improvised ...”

“... came dressed as Henry VIII and fed lion meat to his guests. Back in the mutinous 1960s, James Baldwin promised a ‘fire next time’. But the fire this time comes in cool, ironic novels like Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. When Oliver Stone released his satirical movie Wall Street, the business press embraced ...”