“... his period in Northern Ireland (he remained the Ulster Unionist MP for South Down until 1987), Margaret Thatcher took care to stay on friendly terms with Powell, partly out of a certain sympathy with his views and partly because his support, even when it was tacit, could do her no harm, but she never made any move to tempt him back into the Tory fold, for ...”

“... father, restoration hang Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss Repair those violent harms. (King Lear, IV.vii) It is often said that Susanna was Shakespeare’s favourite daughter, and that Judith – who signed her name with an awkward little mark like two pigtails, who was still a spinster at the age of 30 – was always second best. This is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he also said that the Bank of England was ‘in pole position’ to help the car industry. Mervyn King believes it is a matter for government, not the Bank, to come to the aid of ailing industries, and the Bank immediately began briefing against the notion that it should do more: it is not ‘commercially viable’, they said, objecting to Mandelson’s ...”

“... which had a good sound, as ‘the interspeglium’ and ‘the corigada’, which names, he told Margaret, ‘the children could not understand.’ If I go down to the bottom of the garden it seems as if some one had fallen into the brook. How would you go about dividing Emerson’s grief into components? There seems to be no bargaining and no anger in ...”

“... conceded that he did not yet live in ‘an enlightened age’; but thanks to his liberal Prussian king it was at least an ‘Age of Enlightenment’. Kant’s confidence in the ultimate triumph of Enlightenment never wavered, though it took a terrible battering in the remaining twenty years of his life. Frederick the Great died in 1786, to be succeeded by the ...”

“... to expose the relationship.In one respect Murray’s account is less informative than David King Dunaway’s in Huxley in Hollywood (1989). Dunaway, unlike Murray, spoke to Rosalind Bruce Huxley, Leonard’s second wife. Even after seventy years, her recollection was brutal: ‘The girl was village educated in a mild way. It couldn’t have worked. His ...”

“... Dancer from the Dance, George Whitmore’s Nebraska, Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples; and a decade since the first Aids fiction started to show up: Robert Ferro’s Second Son, David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, Allen Barnett’s beautiful The Body and Its Dangers. Today, as a result of political pressure as well as recognition of ...”

“... became even worse in the course of the decade. In September 1978, just a few months after Margaret Thatcher claimed to understand why English men and women might feel their country was being ‘swamped’ by Commonwealth immigrants, the National Front moved its central offices from Teddington in West London to Great Eastern Street, a few ...”

“... crops up in the dedicatory verses, comparing the mission of Agee and Evans to that of Edgar in King Lear: ‘Edgar, weeping for pity, to the shelf of that sick bluff,/Bring your blind father, and describe a little.’ But they are not much like Edgar, not on the scene to show and expound suffering to the sufferers; and one of Agee’s truest points will be ...”

“... In Smart City, Donald Trump is a good thing. He makes the faultline visible. The gold-topped King Ubu of the internet has been generous enough to embody all the creeping horrors of corporate opportunism, all the self-serving, reflex mendacity of political operators with a more emollient pitch. The man is visible. He is loud enough to be heard across ...”

“... asserts its status. A fatter, lusher and therefore more significant account than James King’s 1991 William Blake, His Life. King doesn’t have such a subversive programme – though he casts a sharper eye on the motives of men like John Linnell, whom he depicts as a hustling opportunistic businessman as well ...”

“... Tamara Karsavina; the photographer Berenice Abbott; modernist designer Eileen Gray; Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, editors of the avant-garde literary magazine the Little Review; not to mention Colette, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Djuna Barnes, Romaine Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Janet Flanner, Vita Sackville-West, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Ivy ...”

“... civil engineering achievements. Look at anything deriving from the key icon of the era, Margaret Thatcher, hard hat perched on hard hair, giving her blessing to Paul Reichmann, as they gloat over a scale-model of the future city of glass. My spirits were high. The Dome (or ‘Doom’, as displaced locals spoke of it) was a Bunyanesque target, a ...”

“... is damned after hearing a livid sermon that could have been preached in 1690 to the followers of King Billy; yet the Swinging Sixties are coming. Ma has glamorous outfits and the film has a Van Morrison soundtrack. When he is caught up in the looting of a supermarket, Buddy snatches the latest must-have, a box of biological washing powder. There is a sense ...”