“... furniture, and didn’t calm down until a doctor arrived and injected her with a tranquilliser. James McCord, head of the plumbers, the White House unit which broke into the DNC Watergate offices, who had been a bodyguard to the Mitchells, later said that she’d been kidnapped.In Haldeman’s diary, Martha in the summer of 1972 was as big a problem for the ...”

“... doesn’t seem very long since I did the same for Roy Jenkins. At Bodley I’m overtaken by A.N. Wilson, who’s brought his gown in a Sainsbury’s bag, though it’s part of Roy Jenkins’s legacy that gowns are no longer required on such occasions. This doesn’t stop many of the voters swishing about in them for the benefit of their families, who are ...”

“... back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of Guildford, Foreign Office minister, still in government at the age of 76 under his fellow Etonian David Cameron, alongside his ...”

“... She shut the pits and she shut the shipyard.’ (In fact, the shipyard closed in 1975, when Harold Wilson was in power.) But he went on to say that he looked on her more kindly now. ‘She might have done it for a good reason. I’m starting to think that way in me older days and becoming a bit more of a capitalist myself.’ At the same time, he faulted ...”

“... premiere of The Rake’s Progress – one finds that the boon-companions were Peter Bartok, Edmund Wilson, Fritz Reiner, Rudolph Bing, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Paco Lagerstrom, Auden, Kallman, Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Stravinsky was, however, saddled at this time as on several occasions with the chaotic if aristocratic poet Edward ...”

“... only that Oswald is an insufferable name (Who was Oswald Fish? asks the initialled onomast A.N. Wilson), awash with the sub-Shakespearean sinister and histrionic, and darkly seconded by Mosley’s middle name (‘Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley’). For Tom is such a relief of a contrast to Oswald. It would have been difficult, however well-justified, to animate ...”

“... of the process of writing, she’s building a canvas as well as she is putting on the paint,’ James Taylor, another conquest, explained. ‘It’s never straight on.’ Mitchell’s lyrical indirection, the habit of thinking against conventional tropes, is an extension of what she calls her ‘perverse need for originality’, a manifestation of a ...”

“... was well put by one of the first grown-up critics to write about detective fiction, Edmund Wilson, in his 1945 essay-review, ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Her writing is of a mawkishness and banality that seem to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot ...”

“... Adams would have subscribed to the view that ‘all men are created equal’ – but, as James Shapiro recently showed in Shakespeare in a Divided America, he also thought that Desdemona’s ‘fondling with Othello is disgusting’ and her passion for him ‘unnatural solely and exclusively because of his colour’. It would be convenient if such ...”

“... media scapegoating. Heath called the ‘Who governs Britain?’ general election, and lost. Harold Wilson’s Labour government then pushed the unions into a policy of supposedly voluntary wage restraint with the Social Contract, while continuing to let unemployment rise and living standards fall. People were ‘once again bemused and confused by the spectacle ...”

“... Oscar Wilde, Melville, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Erasmus, all within the first three paragraphs. Some appreciate Hardwick’s tacit assumption of her readers’ sophistication; the rest of us feel bamboozled.The​ essays in Seduction and Betrayal were written when Hardwick and ...”

“... trying for a half a century to distinguish the writer from the talking ghost, and some – Edmund Wilson, for instance – found it easier to do the trick than Hemingway himself. When he was young, he worked very hard at never saying anything the way anybody else would say it, and his success was remarkable. Later he often managed to do it again, when the ...”

“... he does not flinch from analysing those who reached the top – MacDonald, Attlee, Gaitskell, Wilson. But he has just as much to say about those dedicated but less well-known people who did so much to build up the Labour Party’s machine: Henderson, Morrison, Dalton and Rita Hinden. And in the figure of Morgan Phillips this third major strength of the ...”

“... are linked with Jack Trevor Story and Angela Carter; weird genealogies are disclosed. ‘Angus Wilson, the novelist, who bore a striking resemblance to Margaret Rutherford, the actress who originally played Miss Marple’, is present. Also namechecked are Patricia Hodge, Simon Russell Beale, Giles Gordon (once Moorcock’s literary agent), Andrea Dworkin ...”

“... awareness of what the blood knows and the mind has forgotten: a sense of origin’, as August Wilson said of the blues. Be my husband man I be your wife Be my husband man I be your wife Be my husband man I be your wife Loving all of you the rest of your life yeah Simone’s voice – its power and penetration – was her achievement; she insisted fiercely ...”