“... first-class people to semi-starvation.’ He had in mind the treatment of people like his father, David, who, as Bevan put it, was ‘choked to death’ by pneumoconiosis (a lung condition caused by long-term inhalation of coal dust) but received no compensation since the condition wasn’t classified as an industrial disease under the Workmen’s ...”

“... on the occasion of the non-indictment of Brown’s killer, a white police officer called Darren Wilson. ‘We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America,’ he writes in a typically despairing passage: The terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own … You have been cast into a race in which the ...”

“... that was the wording on the landing cards destroyed by the Home Office in 2010. Paulette Wilson, Hubert Howard and the many others whose shocking stories are told in The Windrush Betrayal by Amelia Gentleman, the journalist whose investigations led to the uncovering of the scandal, came in on their parents’ British passports: from the moment of ...”

“... Command Performance of the film: ‘Tony saw Love Story in New York. Hated it.’ When Dennis Main Wilson says, ‘Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part,’ she cuts down his faux modesty with: ‘Isn’t that that frightfully dreary thing in the East End?’ At the end of Carousel at the National Theatre, Richard ...”

“... by homicidal maniacs on a collision course are also coming closer to one another. The novelist David Lodge, in one of the earnest but flustered contributions typical of Authors take sides on the Falklands, is more realistic. He writes that regaining the Falklands is not worth one human life. But he then confesses: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that ...”

“... David Solkin​ ’s new book is designed to replace Painting in Britain 1530-1790, a volume of the Pelican history of art by Ellis Waterhouse, which was first published in 1953 and appeared in five separate editions, the last in 1994, nine years after Waterhouse’s death. Waterhouse’s history was quickly recognised as a classic ...”

“... an attempt to steer the party away from socialism – the attempt on which William Rodgers and David Owen seem to be embarked, and which has led Roy Jenkins and David Marquand to abandon the party. A desperate public cry to Shirley Williams: why have you got so lost in that company, one with ineffable self-confidence but ...”

“... Young – who performed his forthcoming album, Harvest, at a party in John’s house – and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who, when Elton went to see him, sang the chorus of ‘Your Song’ (‘I hope you don’t mind/I hope you don’t mind’) over and over. ‘By now, the novelty of hearing the chorus of “Your Song” sung to me by one of pop ...”

“... In his​ History of Great Britain, published in 1653, Arthur Wilson wrote: ‘I see no reason why princes (towering in the height of their own power) should think themselves so far above ordinary mortals, that their actions are to be incomprehensible. This is but a weakness, contracted in the high place they look down from ...”

“... for three days after an accident on the A9 was reported to the police (they both died). Gordon Wilson, a former leader of the SNP, has called for the break-up of the national police service, and the creation of four new regional forces. Yet, this brouhaha notwithstanding, the controversy over police reforms has not translated into a perception of the SNP ...”

“... and soundscape appears in several of her compatriots’ work, in the poetry of Grace Nichols and David Dabydeen, and, especially, in the fiction of Wilson Harris. (I once invited Harris, a long-time resident of Chelmsford, to talk about what it was like to live in Essex: he wrote back to say that he had no idea – his ...”

“... Baudelaire and his Gallic followers. The hero of the first novella writes mysteries as William Wilson, and gets involved in a case by taking a chance on a wrong number and doubling as the private eye asked for, Paul Auster ‘of the Auster Detective Agency’. In fact, the ingeniously-constructed Trilogy is peppered with references to Auster himself, to ...”

“... Hill supplies an engaging and suggestive piece on radical pirates after the Restoration; Wilson Hays offers an interesting study of John Everard; and there is some predictably tough and valuable political analysis from David Underdown and Nicholas Rogers. What emerges from most of these essays, however, is not so ...”

“... the precariousness and fragility of human lives, not their culmination in calamity. As Emily Wilson points out in the first volume of this ambitious history of the form, tragedy in ancient times was confined to the theatre. You couldn’t have a tragic novel or a tragic view of the world. Nor could you have a tragic famine or case of heart failure. Using ...”

“... excesses which have resulted (appendices of hyphen lists, for instance) were satirised by Edmund Wilson. Within academic circles there have been ferocious, quasi-theological disputes as to whether copy-text be first or last published version in the author’s lifetime, whether it should follow old or new spelling, and what should be done with substantive ...”