“... eventual success before a hardboiled court (Lord Chief Justice Widgery with Mr Justices James and Bridge) may also have been owed to what is said to have happened when the judges were deliberating in private. James had remarked that far worse stuff could be freely bought half a mile away in Soho, and when the other two expressed incredulity sent his clerk ...”

“...  20 December 2017. Nick Hytner rings saying he hopes to put on the hospital play at the Bridge next year and had I had any thoughts about the title? Off the cuff I suggest Past Caring, which I’m sure has been used, but will serve, if only for the announcement of the season in the New Year.As an early Christmas present Bridget has given us a cow creamer she has made ...”

“... D.W. Harding, L.G. Salingar, Peter Ure, Ian Watt, J.C. Maxwell, L.C. Knights, D.J. Enright, Roy Strong, John Broadbent, Arthur Humphreys, Philip Collins, Pat Rogers, D.W. Jefferson and John Preston. What is disturbing is that everyone made his reputation elsewhere, often in the format which is properly Leavisian, the short, iconoclastic critical ...”

“... Evans’s horizons; and, eventually, he asked Evans to contribute his photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge to Harry and Caresse Crosby’s edition of The Bridge. With apparent casualness – the same casualness that got him into Williams – Evans went on to meet just about anyone in the art and literary worlds who it was or ...”

“... between the two protagonists, but updating the story with the recent work of Colin Matthew, Roy Jenkins, Richard Shannon, John Vincent, Sarah Bradford and Stanley Weintraub. Essentially it’s dry-bones parliamentary history – elections, cabinets, reshuffles, bills, budgets, divisions, dissolutions – and its verdict on the falling out hardly deepens ...”

“... hated the clichés and party-line posturing, and dismissed the pamphlet as ‘bloody rot’. Roy Campbell jeered at the Republicans: ‘The sodomites are on your side;/The cowards and the cranks.’ Ezra Pound said the enemy wasn’t Franco, but big-time international finance: ‘You are all had. Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed ...”

“... one who knew how to ‘manipulate perceptions’, as one of his rivals told me. The trumpeter Roy Eldridge thought he was ‘jiving’. Miles Davis called him ‘all screwed up inside’, and wrote in his autobiography that Coleman ‘just came and fucked up everybody’.Coleman wasn’t the only jazz musician on the scene who was looking for a way out of ...”

“... also produced a string of politicians, including Herbert Asquith, Harold Macmillan, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Edward Heath.Murray’s family may not have been Balliol men (he was the third generation of his family to study across the road at Exeter College), but their scholarly and civil service genealogy conforms to its ethos, and Murray hints at a close ...”

“... air, Progressing south-east at a dizzy rate Until I look down and see Sydney there. The Harbour Bridge looks like a paperweight, The Opera House like fractured Tupperware. It all shines like quicksilver in the dawn. Cloud-cuckoo-land. The land where I was born. Here when the young are forced to take the dole It just means they spend more time at the ...”

“... besides, the natural tendency of political biographers to concentrate on the political struggle. Roy Jenkins’s life gives us an entrancing account of the life of Victorian politicians: when they went to bed and got up, what they drank, what trains they took (Jenkins was a Bradshaw buff). But about what went on in Gladstone’s head Jenkins leaves us not ...”

“... it, which laid the foundations of Livingstone’s politics. In this very long autobiography – Roy Jenkins managed Gladstone’s life in less – the most rewarding pages come near the beginning. A politician who believes he can still win power is likely to present himself in the best of lights, or at least suppress any awkward self-knowledge he may happen ...”

“... me, after a night at Danceteria, to chop lines of that fell drug with her on her parents’ Roy Lichtenstein print.’ True co-dependency is achieved when he hooks up with Jen, a girlfriend who also gets regularly blitzed. When they host a dinner party together (bad idea), Jen’s too busy vomiting in the bathroom to greet the guests. As in most ...”

“... baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester Square at noon, the Tube as crowded as at rush hour, then walk up Charing Cross Road to where the march is streaming across Cambridge Circus. There seems no structure to it, ahead of us some SWP banners but ...”

“... avail. Stalin acquired a few contacts among foreign Communists resident in Moscow (the Indian M.N. Roy, the Finn Otto Kuusinen, the Hungarian economist Eugen Varga), but these people were marginal in the Comintern world of the 1920s. By the time another Stalin contact, the Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov, took over the Comintern, the institution itself had become ...”

“... a mural at Stapleton Road station. Accompanied by W.G. Grace and the Indian reformer Raja Ramohan Roy, who died on a visit to Bristol in 1833, Tillett sits on a suitcase, reading a newspaper. On its back page, a headline declares: ‘Former Easton Waif Unionises Nation’s Unskilled Workers’.In 2024, Henry Palmer, who grew up in Easton, stood for Labour in ...”