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“... magic circle of lobby men, lunching with him at St Stephen’s Club once a week. He saw Harold Wilson every week too, with the other members of the ‘White Commonwealth’, as the handpicked political editors were then called. Yet he did not grow to love or respect these great men. On the contrary, in his book he portrays most of the prime ministers he ...”

“... the reassuring story of the UK’s first Euro-referendum in 1975. Then, the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had gone through the motions of a renegotiation of Britain’s place in the European Economic Community and, with that token effort behind him, shepherded the forces of pragmatism to a resounding victory for remaining in the Common Market. The ...”

“... problem has been worked out, there’s not often much point in going back over it – as Edmund Wilson almost said, who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd afterwards – but good examples of the form have other attractions. They usually seem to owe their durability to elements in them that are gratuitous, strictly speaking. The sleuths don’t really need all ...”

“... but Hedy Lamarr, ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’. Her new surname was inspired by Barbara La Marr, a star of silent film. The ‘most beautiful’ tag came from Louis B. Mayer, who brought her to MGM with other Mitteleuropean émigrées such as Greer Garson and Ilona von Hajmassy (though the theatre director Max Reinhardt had already declared ...”

“... trollies. The diary entry in question was not published until 1984, by which time the diarist, Barbara Pym, had become a cult figure in English literary circles. By that time, too, the words blue celanese trollies needed translation. Neither celanese nor that particular meaning of trolley are to be found in the recent Longman Dictionary (the phrase being ...”

“... Zuckerman had an answer, but his logic forced people to put the correct questions. In 1964, Harold Wilson asked Zuckerman to go to the House of Lords and become Minister for Disarmament. Zuckerman very sensibly calculated that he could be more use as a civil servant. In 1966, Wilson sent him to the Cabinet Office and made ...”

“... collective heads censoriously, before regaling their readers with the same prurient stories. And Barbara Bush has done her bit for the sales by describing the book as Kitty-Litter. Even now, when the initial publicity surge is well over, it can still be seen in almost every airport lounge and railway bookstore on both sides of the Atlantic. It is still a ...”

“... villain, Lorenzo. By contrast, the court of Shakespeare’s play is so ambiguous a place that G. Wilson Knight, elsewhere a brilliantly sensitive critic, once notoriously argued that Claudius is a ‘good and gentle king’, whereas Hamlet is an ambassador of death invading the happy calm of the court. Wilson Knight went ...”

“... preclude taking plenty of other young married women out for special ‘drives’. One of them, Barbara Maclaren, returned from a seaside drive with the prime minister red in the face and crying. When a friend asked what had happened in the car, she wrote that he had ‘my head jammed down on to his shoulder and all his fingers in my mouth’. Was this the ...”

“... Davie’s kind, the scope widens rapidly outward from there. Our best living Shakespeare critic, Wilson Knight, has claimed Henry VIII as a great Christian drama; it would not be precisely the play that I would choose, but a similar kind of case could be made for, say, the gaol scene in Cymbeline as among the most original Christian writing of the late ...”

“... being closely attended to, even feared, by ministers and by the public. And it was feared. Harold Wilson’s 1964-70 and 1974-76 Governments and James Callaghan’s 1976-79 Administration spent more time cajoling, ‘standing up to’, browbeating, placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other group. Robert Taylor’s close account of the ...”

“... Histories: and I am thinking here of basic studies of the 1940s and 50s, like Dover Wilson’s The Fortunes of Falstaff, or useful popular books like Tillyard’s on Shakespeare’s History Plays.These early studies, with their monarchical interests, tended to be strongly conservative in their attitudes. They worked to defend the rejection of ...”

“... record of the inner workings of the Labour Party during the transition from the Attlee era to the Wilson years. The period covered saw the Bevanite revolt in the early 1950s, the subsequent emergence of a revisionist critique of socialism, and the efforts by Hugh Gaitskell to fight and fight again to save the party which many of his political heirs have now ...”

“... this was ‘almost certainly wrong’. Sometimes people have reason to be paranoid. If Harold Wilson was the ‘paranoid conspiracy theorist’ Walton paints him as – it’s the almost obligatory description of him in books like this: Walton uses the word ‘paranoid’ about Wilson four times on a single page ...”

“... Berg, the biographer of Maxwell Perkins, Sam Goldwyn, Charles Lindbergh and (in the works) Woodrow Wilson, first met Hepburn in 1982, when she was 75, and was a close friend until she died at the end of June this year. On his first visit, before they have properly met, she twice asks whether Berg has used the bathroom. He says he doesn’t need ...”