“... though he is and no doubt wishes to be, is not quite the centre either. Is there hope in Mrs Shirley Williams? I should not have thought so, given the extreme ambiguity of her actions and opinions, in the matter of education as in some others. However, you never know when you may need a friend or who that friend may be, and Dr Rae speaks of her ...”

“... agencies and that they wanted to bring him down. At first his colleagues thought, like Shirley Williams, that he was ‘off his trolley’ when he pointed out bumps in the ceiling and said they held listening devices. Williams remembers a conversation in the cabinet chamber: ‘That’s a bug. They’re ...”

“... à la SDP? The latter boasted a few well-known and intelligent social democrats – Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen, Peter Jenkins and Polly Toynbee – but they were still destroyed by the electoral system and had to stave off obscurity by a political transplant, merging with the Liberals, an experiment that ended in disaster in 2015. Were ...”

“... Since the SDP was hardly more than a creature of the media – ‘the BBC is now the voice of Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins’ – it might seem that the future would lie with the Left, once the power of the media had been broken. It was in this spirit that Benn launched his bid for the deputy leadership, as his contribution to the permanent ...”

“... their barricades in Paternoster Square. One by one or in neatly opposed couples – Ken Clarke and Shirley Williams, say – funeral attendees were interrogated about the legacy. Rarely can such an Alice in Wonderland charivari of local stereotypes have been assembled, some of them (like Dave and Samantha Cameron) quite obviously having a good time, with ...”

“... known as ‘A Time for Us’, and was recorded for orchestra by Henry Mancini and later sung by Shirley Bassey, Andy Williams and many others. Time seems to be running backwards for us: the film is haunted by later echoes of what it started. I don’t know where this leaves us, but it’s clear that Rota’s ...”

“... understanding achieved. Contrast this with Question Time on BBC 1 last night with Norman Tebbit, Shirley Williams and some unidentified industrialist. Tebbit played his usual role of a sneer on legs, snarling and heaping contempt on any vaguely liberal view and the discussion, which was no discussion at all, was rancorous and rowdy and left all ...”

“... to rise to a level at which economies might save a significant sum. It was in this context that Shirley Williams, as Minister of State for Education, put forward her 13 points. These were possible measures of economy, put forward as the first step towards a rational dialogue with universities. They were brusquely rejected, in terms which made it clear ...”

“... be a disaster for women: from 27 Deputies out of 491 they will diminish to 24 or 25 out of 577. Shirley Williams please note. What is true for women is also true for the young. The party bosses are naturally more susceptible to the powerful pressure of the senior sitting Deputies than to the claims of younger hopefuls with less bargaining power. It ...”

“... Just Master’. The later and less complimentary political anagrams cited by Fowler are great: Shirley Williams is ‘I aimlessly whirl’, while Tony Blair MP decodes as ‘I’m Tory plan B’. There are more recent possibilities he doesn’t explore: Nicholas Clegg’s name suggests he could shift up a gear (‘I’ll change cogs’) or just slow ...”

“... But nothing short of all-women shortlists seems to lift the number of female MPs significantly. Shirley Williams tried to convince the Lib Dems to introduce them. ‘They all thought, I’m jolly good, so I’ll be swept in,’ Williams told Ridge. ‘All these luscious young girls … took to the platform wearing ...”

“... for the Congolese people working for them were dire. There’s a sickening description in Susan Williams’s book, from an American observer in the 1940s, of the flogging of a Congolese man with a chicotte – ‘a whip made of leather thongs tipped with metal’ – for stealing a pack of cigarettes from a Belgian. ‘The black’s skin from neck to waist ...”

“... by some way the most senior of the Gang of Four – the others were David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams – and in these years he still had the aura of a political heavyweight. In a 1983 lecture he called for ‘some of the rational panache which Keynes showed nearly fifty years ago’, and ‘rational panache’ isn’t a bad description of ...”

“... Hard to imagine​ a brisker, bleaker opening than this one from the title story of Joy Williams’s 2004 collection, Honoured Guest: She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny in the eleventh grade and you had to be careful about this because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left 24 suicide notes and had become just a joke ...”

“... The pure products​ of America go crazy, William Carlos Williams wrote, but he was only half right: America’s crazy, and so sometimes its pure products go sane. Consider the eponymous narrator of Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout. When we first meet him, in the Supreme Court’s ‘cavernous chambers’, the sellout’s hands are cuffed behind his back ...”