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“... Wellington (her pen as mighty as his sword); Gash’s Peel (a peerless study of a baronet); Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne (one patrician beguilingly evoking another); Blake’s Disraeli (champagne and epigrams all the way); and Marquand’s MacDonald (Fame is the spur stood on its head). But many prime ministers have ...”

“... than it ever was in life. For thirty years he railed in vain against the leadership, first of MacDonald, Snowden and Jimmy Thomas, then of Attlee, Morrison, Bevin and the upstart Gaitskell, antagonising the union bosses and the PLP equally, the darling only of the constituencies. He was expelled from the party in 1939 and very nearly again in 1955, and by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... might be a recognition of that fact. If, however, his resignation is simply to make way for David Davis, then nothing has been learned. The Conservatives would do well to think harder next time: the old xenophobic parochialism which once did so well for them has weakened as the Conservative working class has disappeared. This culture’s disarray can be ...”

“... death in 1969. That year came two editions of the Memoirs, one edited by Pierre Citron, the other David Cairns’s translation. Critical editions of Berlioz’s other writings, and his Correspondance Générale, are well advanced; critical and analytical scholarship has moved into top gear in Germany, the United States and Britain; the New Berlioz ...”

“... the Border hills near Beattock on the way to South Uist and Barra. At Oban I’ll rendezvous with David Paterson, a landscape photographer, who’s working with me on a book on the Highland Clearances. As I overtake a worn blue Audi estate, I look sideways and see Dave’s face and grizzled beard. We exchange incoherent signs, pull in a little later on the ...”

“... by excluding dissent. Enrolling at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, he read Dwight Macdonald’s essay ‘The Responsibility of Peoples’. Macdonald asked why, if the German people were to be held responsible for Nazi atrocities, the American people were not thought responsible for the saturation bombing of ...”

“... past. And so, for a time, it proved. But, as we have now discovered, only for a time. For Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden in 1931, read Callaghan, Carter and Mitterrand in our own day. National economic sovereignty is once again an illusion. The huge, unprecedented growth in world trade which was one of the main engines of the long boom of the 1950s and ...”

“... In London, Elgar shuffled from club to club, but he resigned from the Athenaeum when Ramsay MacDonald was elected; and in the country he shuffled from house to house, accompanied by his devoted dogs and dogged devotees. He recorded his works for the gramophone, but at the concert halls the public stayed away in droves. They wanted Façade, not ...”

“... the private papers of many of the figures most closely involved, such as Lloyd George and Ramsay MacDonald, and by combing the available official documents, Hall has managed to put together the first serious financial history of the monarchy in the modern period. Inevitably, there are parts of his account which are sketchy and speculative, his broader grasp ...”

“... who ‘Rustum’s son’ was and was much too frightened to ask. 4 August. The announcement of Gus Macdonald’s ministerial appointment and accompanying peerage stirs up all the predictable cries. No lip-service to democratic legitimacy here. I was unaware until subsequently reading Paul Foot in the Guardian that ...”

“... Nicolson won the seat of West Leicester for National Labour, the rump that had followed Ramsay MacDonald after the Labour split of 1931. It was at the same election that Channon stepped into what was for the 20th century a most unusual pocket borough. Lord Elveden was the MP for Southend from 1918 until he became earl of Iveagh in 1927; his wife took over ...”

“... of Dickensian horror: to Oliver Twist, fed on the scraps that the Sowerberrys’ dog refused; to David Copperfield, beaten by the fiendish Murdstones; to the little half-starved Marchioness, kept in a dungeon by Sally Brass; to the Nicklebys and Nell, driven out into the harsh world. Indeed, orphans are so plentiful in the works of Dickens that it is quite a ...”

“... Dylan’s ‘barbed-wire tonsils’ (Ian Hamilton’s words), his ‘voice like sand and glue’ (David Bowie’s). ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, Ricks says in his chapter on ‘Pride’, is saved ‘from being – in all its vituperative exhilaration – even more damnably proud than the person whom it damns and blasts . . . There can be felt in the refrain an ...”

“... David Attenborough​ was born in 1926, the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Elizabeth II. He began hosting Zoo Quest on BBC television in 1954; not quite seventy years later, his latest series, Wild Isles, has just finished airing (it’s still available on iPlayer, or Amazon Prime for those outside the UK ...”