“... it becomes more sceptical and sexually adventurous. Byron’s two most important poems, Childe Harold and Don Juan, are also problematic texts, since they were censored and distorted, to a degree that significantly changed their direction, by the publisher Murray. Coleridge himself went on editorialising and re-interpreting ‘The Ancient Mariner’, which ...”

“... clear, is disingenuous: Lee stayed – unlike many of the Clydesiders whose ties to the ILP leader James Maxton were as strong as hers – because she didn’t want to compromise her socialist principles. She believed in fighting for socialism against the enemy, which was sometimes within: ‘I wanted to take part in a political contest where the alignments ...”

“... of George III when trying to fit in another character who was larger than life, namely Charles James Fox. To have given him his proper due would have meant him taking over the play. And so it is with Humphrey Carpenter, my only excuse being that he would have been the first to understand this and to be unsentimental about it. When he turned up on the stage ...”

“... press has any trouble speaking in both tongues, often at the same time. The child killers of James Bulger are ‘evil’, as of course are paedophiles; maybe abuse of the Bulger killers would have counted as a deed of righteous vengeance. In the recent flap over Jon Venables’s reincarceration, op-ed narodniks happily affirmed that he should be held ...”

“... pen, but for those more comfortable with plain writing in English, it began perhaps with William James deriding the ‘copy theory of truth’. This path has been increasingly followed of late; its most widely-read exposition is Richard Rorty’s pragmatism. The will to truth disappears, and is replaced by a desire for more or less satisfactory ...”

“... to be settled out of court.’ He also thought the Russians were not about to move in the West. Harold Macmillan says he was ‘sceptical about a Russian attack in the West’. Having committed troops from 16 countries, from all five continents, to blocking the unification of Korea under a revolutionary regime, the West decided that it would try to reunify ...”

“... as such as ‘could only have been contrived by a poet who had never experienced pregnancy’. To Harold Acton she was ‘the essential hysterical intellectual spinster’ and however unpleasant his tone it is impossible to disagree with his conclusion that ‘dear Edith wasn’t exactly what you might call cuddly.’ As so often it is Sitwell herself who ...”

“... Macaulay and Gibbon, Tom Paine and Cobbett, Hume and Herbert Spencer. They never missed a Harold Laski public lecture. They went in a solid phalanx to hear Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton debate at Kingsway Hall. And they formed an archaeological group to look for relics of Norman and Roman London whenever they happened to have freshly excavated building ...”

“... thinking, and that clear thinking was essential to social health. This explains his choice of Harold Laski as a principal target in the essay on ‘Politics and the English Language’. But his extreme fastidiousness goes beyond that intelligible concern for straight as against crooked or muddled thinking. Good prose must have a force, a dignity, that ...”

“... after death is to write it himself. And if he entertains pretensions to prolixity, it helps, as Harold Macmillan was the first to admit, if you own a publishing house as well. This diminished celebration of the recently-departed has been paralleled by a scholarly reaction against biographies of the more distantly-deceased. The Victorians’ confident vigour ...”

“... Mitchell writes of it as hauntingly as John Lee Hooker sang of it. In 1938 Mitchell was hired by Harold Ross as a staff writer for the New Yorker, though his first contribution to the magazine had been published in 1933. He took up with writers like Philip Hamburger, S.J. Perelman and James Thurber, but his best friend at ...”

“... A.J. Stockwell actually begins his valuable essay on authority in the Empire with a quote from Harold Macmillan. Power is illusory: ‘when you achieve it there is nothing there.’ The British of course enjoyed a lot more than nothing. But – whatever ideas or initiatives were devised in the metropolis – the Empire was always in practice made by the ...”

“... his advocacy of mostly British architecture, from the Brutalist buildings of the Smithsons and James Stirling, through the Pop designs of Archigram and Cedric Price, to the high-tech megastructures of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, so providing a critical genealogy for these postwar architects as well. Despite his smooth narrative, Whiteley does not paper ...”

“... way in which the commotions began tends to support the view of, among others, Abraham Lincoln and Harold Macmillan that events are the motors of history, not policy decisions, or, according to Hoyle, the deeper underlying structures, the slowly shifting tectonic plates preferred by Braudel and his school. The unfortunately coincidental presence in north-east ...”

“... have to satisfy the demands of the all-powerful and long-serving head of CIA counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, who has recently died. The undeniably brilliant Angleton was also at least half-crazy. He saw moles everywhere and had paralysed the CIA for years on end with his frenetic witch-hunting. (One CIA officer wrote a bitter report suggesting that ...”