“... taking his displacement from the board of New Left Review in 1963 with the good grace that E.P. Thompson, for example, seems to have found difficult to muster. With the Sixties Williams embarked decisively on a career as a political writer which he pursued until his death. Really, one feels, his heart was always in the politics of what he wrote about ...”

“... the early Auden. (He does not, however, give us the earliest text of ‘Spain’, defended by E.P. Thompson in ‘Outside the Whale’.) Some critics would see Tony Harrison as a leading continuer of the radical tradition. Where Hill eschews the prosaic, Harrison courts it, pushing poetry to the brink of banality in the manner of the Lyrical Ballads, trying ...”

“... to seal her success, and that she lost her touch over the years that preceded the poll tax fiasco. Douglas Hurd mentioned on television that she should have gone two years before she did, but that he’d stuck by her as a minister till the bitter end, for her own sake and for the country’s. I’ve been talking here about contributors who wrote about her in ...”

“... steps out onto the scaffold. 30 March. Obituary of Dudley M. in yesterday’s Independent by Harry Thompson, the biographer of Peter Cook, whose side one might therefore expect him to take. Instead Thompson very much takes Dudley’s line on himself: namely, that he was only brought into Beyond the Fringe as a musical ...”

“... just about every leading social scientist (Titmuss, Townsend, Halsey, Floud), historian (Hobsbawm, Thompson, Hill) or literary intellectual (Wesker, Tynan) in sight. This was what gave the 1964 Labour Government a significance far greater than the 1974-79 Administration. 1964 saw the coming together of the British best and brightest. The failure of Wilsonism ...”

“... by media greedy for stories about sex, the leggy Jay twins (daughters of the Labour politician, Douglas Jay) and campus revolutions. Briggs, as dean of social sciences, was boosterish about his learning reforms, although much more radical changes, including the Scottish pattern of a generalist first year, had already been introduced at the pioneering ...”

“... by one of the great Americans; Frank O’Hara on his lunch hour from the Museum of Modern Art; Douglas Woolf driving somewhere, between jobs; Fielding Dawson. Drummond speaks of the pieces that make up 45 as ‘stories’. Some of them are very short, a set of acknowledgments dropped into the middle of the book. The ad hoc, collaged assembly is reminiscent ...”

“... she lost the war. Within a year Major, working in conjunction with the new foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, got her to sign up to ERM membership despite all her misgivings.How did Major and Hurd succeed where Lawson and Howe had failed? Ever sensitive to the idea that he was Thatcher’s poodle, the new chancellor was determined to prove his independence ...”