“... representation in the Scottish Parliament as an act of ‘charitable giving’. In 1999, in the first election to the Scottish Parliament after the devolution referendum, Labour went from winning 78 per cent of Scottish seats in the 1997 general election to 43 per cent of those at Holyrood. The SNP was not the only beneficiary of PR; the Conservatives, who ...”

“... at the culture he eviscerated in his fiction, and his letters become a catalogue of tiny hurts. To Ruth Miller, a former student, apropos a piece in the New York Times by Louis Simpson occasioned by Humboldt’s Gift: It was cheap, mean, it did me dirt … I don’t ask myself why the Times prints such miserable stuff, why I must be called an ingrate, a ...”

“... happens if UK financial regulations diverge from those in the EU. This provokes two uncertainties: first, that the islands will be forced to choose between retaining access to markets in either the UK or the EU; second, that the government will put into action its occasional threats to turn the post-Brexit UK into a floating tax haven if it can’t agree a ...”

“... through the consciously poetical, to the forceful but semantically oblique assertion: But take Ruth who drowned last week. I used to fancy her – now all I think is what water can do, easing off shoes, making light of the dense net of her tights. To hell with out of place! That’s the fucking Thames dribbling down your face! But the deaths of ...”

“... that he will sell his story to a national daily, find a new mistress, perhaps be reunited with his first wife, he goes for an enthusiastic trot down Fleet Street and runs into the path of a speeding van. The plot is intricate, perhaps a little overburdened, as comic plots tend to be, and wrought into a continuous narrative with no chapter divisions to mark the ...”

“... and the ‘three parents’ whose times shaped his life. They were Hilde, or Hildegard Pauline Ruth Gerwing, and the two physicists she successively married, who passed information to the Soviets on the atom-bomb project between 1942 and 1945: Berti, or Engelbert Egon August Ernst Broda, and Alan Nunn May, who was sentenced to ten years for it. Broda, who ...”

“... it’). Neither book rewrites the history of postwar poetry, and each seems to accept that for the first three decades a canon is already pretty much shaped. Partly this is because time has done the sifting for them: Sorley MacLean, who Armitage and Crawford make a point of including as if he were on the margin, is far from being a stranger to mainstream ...”

“... been toppled after a three-month struggle and in March 1970 the country was in the throes of its first ever general election campaign. I was travelling to every major town and many smaller ones, interviewing opposition politicians and those who’d taken part in the uprising for a book. I was still there in May, my work unfinished, when the invitation ...”

“... and impressively active in determining how she was to be perceived. She got her retaliation in first. She taunted her putative tormentors. She used them to her advantage, whatever that was. It might be seeing off the rugby player Will Carling, a lover she was bored by. Carling’s friend Gary Lineker warned him: ‘That woman is trouble.’ The element of ...”

“... has not simply analysed markets but helped create them, starting in 1972 with the world’s first currency futures exchange, the International Monetary Market. Those influenced by Friedman – most famously the ‘Chicago boys’ in Pinochet’s Chile, but also US, Japanese and British economic policy-makers in the 1980s – reshaped entire national ...”

“... of historians of urban life. H.J. (Jim) Dyos died in 1978, still in his fifties, but as the UK’s first professor of urban history and still more through his enthusiastic collaborations and magpie methods, he indelibly shaped the study of city life. Dyos was a thoroughly mid-century and social democratic character: the son of a works manager, he left school ...”

“... a reading series (a recent phenomenon popularised by Dylan Thomas) and archive. Auden stayed with Ruth Witt-Diamant, the Poetry Center’s founding director, and, in return for his considerable largesse, asked only that he be delivered to gay bars where he might meet young Jewish American males with blond hair. Thom Gunn arrived in the Bay Area that same ...”

“... the few enduring characters in postwar British fiction. We watch Biswas become a sign-writer (his first work, for a neighbour, is ‘Idlers Keep Out by Order’), and then a journalist at the Trinidad Sentinel. A dreamer, he likes to read fictional descriptions of bad weather in foreign countries. Eager to write his own stories, he corresponds with the ...”

“... detached houses among the golf courses of Outer London, husbands of ageing and bitter wives they first seduced to Artie Shaw’s ‘Begin the Beguine’ or the Squadronaires’ ‘The Nearness of You’; fathers of cold-eyed lascivious daughters on the pill … and cannabis-smoking jeans-and-bearded Stuart-haired sons whose oriental contempt for ...”

“... with considerable flair. While most pieces have some virtues, some are really exceptionally good. Ruth Harris’s account in Volume Two of the feud between Charcot’s Paris school and Bernheim’s coterie at Nancy, over the value (and risks) of hypnosis and the nature of the hypnotic state, moves elegantly from an account of one of France’s more sordid ...”