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“... I bet he did). It contains an account of the meeting between Lochiel and Charles Edward at MacDonald of Boradale’s. Lochiel argued long and hard to dissuade the Chevalier, but when he failed, he said: ‘I’ll share the fate of my prince; and so shall every man over whom nature or fortune have given me power.’ The quotation from The Wealth of ...”

“... and his domination of economic policy remind one alarmingly of the relationship between Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden in 1931: between a Prime Minister who senses that there is probably a better alternative but who lacks the authority or self-confidence to choose it and a Chancellor of formidable personality who is a rigidly orthodox practitioner of ...”

“... so often accompanies that search.’ Another piece, this one by Leone and her associate Jennifer Macdonald called Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down, endeavours ‘to combine the public and private needs of recording loss. In the space of a child’s sandbox, Ashes, Ashes offers the viewer a fragile and indecipherable moment: a braille text in sand that contains ...”

“... to his programmatic radicalism. One other figure who flits through this early period is Ramsay MacDonald, already dreaming of being prime minister while running a ‘Fellowship House’ in Doughty Street in Bloomsbury. Ellis left London for a medical practice in Blackburn in 1887, and managed to survive the death of his mother (she died as he was reading ...”

“... 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 understood’ Novalis, as ...”

“... compromise or flattery (two supremely silly treatments). And there have been undressed dolls too. Margaret Fuller, the pioneer American feminist, wrote that ‘since Adam, there has been none that approached nearer fitness to stand up before God and angels in the naked majesty of manhood than Robert Burns.’ Catherine Carswell wrote a brave, Lawrentian ...”

“... a credible commitment to moderation, was halted – but by the unions themselves, as much as by Margaret Thatcher. It has given us an economy in which organised labour has very little real corporate power. This is a situation without parallel in any other European state. In different ways, unions in France, Germany and Italy carry a good deal more clout ...”

“... the writer working and sleeping in the house alone. We spoke on the phone sometimes about Dwight MacDonald and essayists he knew and loved. And one time we had a conversation by satellite at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Norman had a way of delighting audiences and he worked them, playing the old roué, then next minute the fierce political ...”

“... and Circumstances’. The assignment had an added appeal: Agee would not be obliged to work with Margaret Bourke-White, Fortune’s staff photographer, whose work he scorned. He wanted Evans, a photographer he knew and admired. The FSA agreed to lend Evans for the project, but retained its rights to whatever pictures he produced. Travelling the backroads of ...”

“... Geoffrey Heald, the priest who introduced Olivier to acting at the choir school of All Saints Margaret Street, and played Petruchio to his 13-year-old Katharina in The Shrew, told him to read Dickens – as an actor, he would never want for characterisations. The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing ...”

“... unerring as it clearly is, he ceases to be one, as do his womenfolk and the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, ‘an unimpressive man; eyes disappointing; rather heavy; middle-class; sunk; grumpy; self-important; wore a black waistcoat’. They all called each other Van, Bogey, Ramsay, Eadie, across the table; engaged in governing England ... Bogey has the ...”

“... same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the GLC. One day, he had found himself taking the Underground in the ...”

“... friends – turns out to have had more in common with J.G. Ballard than with Paul Scott, George MacDonald Fraser, M.M. Kaye and other writers of 1970s bestsellers with imperial themes. Like the empty swimming-pools and weed-choked concrete landscapes that appear again and again in JGB’s imagined futures, the collapsing buildings and insanely cherished ...”

“... There is​ still no plaque at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham (now rebranded as the Macdonald Burlington), to mark the spot where Enoch Powell delivered his famous speech on 20 April 1968. Yet of all the speeches delivered by British politicians in the 20th century, or come to that in the 21st, it remains the most memorable, surpassing even the snatches I can recall of ‘We shall fight on the beaches ...”

“... among those who knew him, the puzzle remained: a born writer, but of what? Walker Evans, Dwight Macdonald and Robert Fitzgerald in their memoirs of Agee all describe an enchanting talker and an inspired observer of people. Also of cities, houses, symphonies, books, movies; one who lived hard, drank hard, and knew the force of his own feelings ...”