“... and intelligence. Its 19 essays concern themes familiar to readers of his biography of Ramsay MacDonald and his distinguished study, The Unprincipled Society: how can we devise for modern Britain an appropriate ‘social democratic’ theory of social action, and how can we construct a ‘progressive’ coalition which might give it adequate electoral ...”

“... turned out, that the same issue of Partisan Review carried an article on Soviet cinema by Dwight Macdonald. Greenberg wrote to the Review’s editors to dispute some of Macdonald’s assumptions. Impressed, the editors – Macdonald among them – invited him to develop his letter into ...”

“... a hair’s breadth of becoming deputy leader of the Party. Opinions differ, but a Party led by Michael Foot and Benn would probably have seen a mass defection of MPs to the SDP. As it was, Benn’s failure paved the way for Neil Kinnock’s purge of the Militant Left, as well as the crucial policy switch from renationalisation of key industries to ...”

“... to his programmatic radicalism. One other figure who flits through this early period is Ramsay MacDonald, already dreaming of being prime minister while running a ‘Fellowship House’ in Doughty Street in Bloomsbury. Ellis left London for a medical practice in Blackburn in 1887, and managed to survive the death of his mother (she died as he was reading ...”

“... by that rickety wood. I’d seen it before, in that frame, and I knew who it was: my grandfather Michael. I knew that’s who it was though I’d never met him. The grandfather was covered in dust and damp patches dried in. But that was him: he had the darkest eyes I’d ever seen. His hair was slick, combed up to a glistening ridge; the lips were thin, the ...”

“... British Columbia. A competition was launched to name it. From five thousand entries, Eleanor MacDonald of Winnipeg won the $250 prize with ‘Prince Rupert’, which appealed to the company president’s belief that he was reviving the spirit of the HBC. Charles Hays never lived to see his hopes pan out: he sank with the Titanic. A depression and ...”

“... the politics so as to make the economics workable again. Revision is needed in two areas. As Michael Stewart shows in his brilliant and disturbing analysis of the political economy of global interdependence and tightening resource constraints, conventional post-Keynesian economic management is spatially myopic. Keynes and his followers presupposed ...”

“... been a government-promoted Plan for Coal. No major industry could be allowed to languish. But, as Michael Flinn points out, it was not with the actual process of mining that 18th-century government concerned itself, but with the trading of the product. The coastwise traffic in coal was the largest activity of British shipping, a major training ground of ...”

“... on about Brecht’s wealth and his diddling of publishers (Völker quotes Brecht quoting Ramsay Macdonald to the effect that while all contracts are sacred, none lasts for ever), but he gives very few figures. It should have been the backbone of his book, but accountancy interests him less than moralising. Brecht’s meanness is a primary quality, and not ...”

“... Disraeli, a miscellany of works which I also passed by, Disraeli not being my favourite man – Michael Foot can have him; Asquith, 600 pages of love-letters to a girl not half his age; Churchill, first of two volumes of biography by an American writer, a disquisition on his political philosophy, and a massive collection of documents relating to his career ...”

“... and Kegan Paul published The Victorian City: Images and Realities, edited by H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, a Wagnerian epic in which history went to town in exuberant, zestful and flamboyant fashion. Understandably, the two volumes won immediate and widespread acclaim as a tour de force of entrepreneurial inspiration and editorial skill: ‘a study in ...”

“... could believe it.’ Not everyone did, especially people who didn’t want to: according to Ian MacDonald, in a piece he wrote for Uncut in 1999, ‘those of us who were fans chose to read Bowie’s stance as ironic.’ Which it may have been up to a point, but he was hardly Charlie Chaplin, or even Mel Brooks. It was more the case, as ...”

“... whatever ground we share. The work of James Agee, Hannah Arendt, Fred Dupee, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Philip Rahv, Delmore Schwartz, Edmund Wilson – these are some of the names Mrs Trilling mentions – gave the myth one of the best runs it has had anywhere. The language of the myth looks a little odd now – people have repeatedly attacked both ...”

“... such as Prescott, Blunkett and Hain merged into the Blairite mass or, like Margaret Beckett, Michael Meacher and Kinnock himself, became bit players on the political stage, Cook remained a prominent and prickly reminder of the electoral calculations that had won Blair the leadership in 1994. In this respect, he was undoubtedly helped by being banished to ...”

“... Errol Flynn (as star) above two of them, Sabatini was not only a ‘history-teller,’ as George MacDonald Fraser defines his art in a foreword to The Fortunes of Casanova, but one who delighted in a spot of swashbuckling. At the same time he was recognised as a serious historian who had published authoritative biographies of Torquemada and Cesare Borgia. He ...”