“... on the cover), nor even a biographical essay (as the author claims in the introduction), but a short, balanced and intelligent account of Franco’s long reign. The author seems to have encountered the traditional difficulty of finding anything original to say about the dictator’s domestic life and relies heavily on the published memoirs of Franco’s ...”

“... literary scene were anti-Stalinist socialists who defended Trotsky. In 1937 William Philips and Philip Rahv had revived Partisan Review as a left-wing anti-Stalinist literary journal. The Committee for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1939 by the philosophers John Dewey and Sidney Hook with a similar programme. Lionel Trilling, James Farrell and Dwight ...”

“... Lawrence, is ‘about envisaging a possible socialist future for England’. It plots protagonist Philip Kane’s brush with Woman (in the guise of Anne, a smoking, free-loving acolyte of the feminist, socialist and gay sociologist, Edward Carpenter) and with Soviet Communism (in the guise of the Russian exile, Ivan Smirnoff, a barfly and violinist, whose ...”

“... Scots when his mother abdicated a month after his first birthday in 1567, and dying several months short of his 59th birthday, he reigned effectively for 57 years. The regal union was unusual in that it was not the direct product of a marriage between heirs, but involved the succession of a King then aged 37 to a virgin Queen who had reigned for almost half a ...”

“... Union, his fourth adult novel, he plays with two genres: the counterfactual, derived from Philip K. Dick; and the noir thriller, derived from Chandler and Hammett. The counterfactual is all in the background. The thriller is all in the foreground. The thematic link between the two is the endlessly precarious nature of Jewishness. Two years ...”

“... 850 pubs, went for £239 million. A template had been established. In 1999 they teamed up with Philip Green to buy the retail firm Sears, which owned a number of high-street clothing chains and a mail-order business. These were all sold within six months, making the brothers and Green some £250 million, twice the amount they had put into the deal. Another ...”

“... of supplication – cue long flattering speech outdoing Demades? – are, in Arrian, curiously cut short. And what has happened to the famous description of Tyre? It would be nice to know, at any rate, what was so distasteful about the inscription that Alexander wrote on the ship he dedicated to Heracles after the conquest, ‘either his own composition or ...”

“... Netherlands in the years between 1550 and 1672, from the dreadful spoliations of Charles V and Philip II to the deadly invasion of Louis XIV, a period comprising the Great Dutch Revolt, under the Princes of Orange and Nassau, the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) that resulted in the independent Dutch Republic, and the infamous Thirty Years War ...”

“... Hull, across the river from his home town. There, supported by colleagues like Richard Hoggart and Philip Larkin, he founded Critical Quarterly, a journal which continues to appeal to a mixed audience of schoolteachers and professional academics. After a year at Berkeley, during which his classes were disrupted by the Free Speech Movement, Cox returned to a ...”

“... months, with the diary unreadable (and illegible). Blame the anaesthetic.4 July. A letter from the Philip Larkin Society, reminding me that I’m an honorary vice-president, which I was unaware of. I’ve never been an enthusiastic member, partly because Larkin wasn’t particularly keen on my stuff or keen on my being keen on his (which I am); Amis (K.) very ...”

“... Monday 23 November 1953: Tonight I watched on television the departure of the Queen and Prince Philip from London Airport. It was immensely moving. The Queen looked so young and vulnerable and valiant, and Prince Philip so handsome and cheerful. A truly romantic couple, star quality in excelsis. True glamour without any ...”

“... a model for royal biography successfully followed by Lady Longford on Queen Victoria, Sir Philip Magnus on Edward VII, Lady Donaldson on Edward VIII, James Pope-Hennessy on Queen Mary and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett on George VI. Now the wheel has come full circle, and we are back to George V again. Is there any need for this? If plain history does not ...”

“... Labour: the Labour Party under Mr Blair more closely resembles the party of Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden than one kitted out for the Nineties. Inevitably, given its strategy, the most obvious characteristic it shares with Very Old Labour is timidity and a wish to be thought acceptable by the existing élites. One form of this is New Labour’s ready ...”

“... and narcotic: ‘The yellow winter days arrived, filled with boredom. A threadbare tablecloth, too short and pocked with holes, covered the rust-coloured earth … The days hardened from cold and boredom like last year’s loaves of bread. They were cut open with dull knives, without appetite, with a lazy somnolence.’ The way Schulz’s narrator sums up the ...”

“... grumps – McCarthy to Edmund Wilson, who locked her in a room to force her to write, Sontag to Philip Rieff, the sociologist she met as a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as Partisan Review’s theatre reviewer. Lines of succession make for neat ...”