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“... the confidence of prime ministers. He was in the private sitting room of Number Ten when Ramsay MacDonald returned from the palace on resigning. He belonged to Chamberlain’s 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 ...”

“... disliked. (According to Leon Edel, he was fond of ‘telling his friends of an alleged attempt by Hugh Walpole to violate the Master, and of James’s passionate recoil’.) Maugham was present on the opening night of Guy Domville in 1895 and seems not to have sympathised when his rival was booed offstage. ‘Do you know why Uncle Henry’s plays don’t ...”

“... distinctive and achingly, emotionally direct’, with ‘razor-sharp’ ‘verbal photos’. ‘Hugh Hefner is “a nut” and “a pimp”, Truman Capote was a “snooty” whiner.’ In fact, Mr Richards doesn’t write at all. The author produced the book ‘with James Fox’, a journalist and friend of Richards’s, but we aren’t told how the ...”

“... the 19th century, sanitising and sugaring the Bard out of recognition. In the 20th century, led by Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish intellectuals hit back, denouncing the Burns cult for its smugness, sexism and wholesale distortion: It has denied his spirit to honour his name. It has denied his poetry to laud his amours. It has preserved his furniture and repelled ...”

“... unerring as it clearly is, he ceases to be one, as do his womenfolk and the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, ‘an unimpressive man; eyes disappointing; rather heavy; middle-class; sunk; grumpy; self-important; wore a black waistcoat’. They all called each other Van, Bogey, Ramsay, Eadie, across the table; engaged in governing England ... Bogey has the ...”

“... He supported women’s suffrage and helped establish the National Library of Scotland; Hugh MacDiarmid became a friend. As an MP, from 1927, he looked into education and workers’ rights. His manor house in Elsfield, outside Oxford, was open to guests of all political persuasions: A.L. Rowse, then a socialist; T.E. Lawrence, who looked ‘like a ...”

“... generations after the fear-thollaidh nan tighean (‘destroyer of homes’) has cleared the place. Hugh MacDiarmid likened it to the silence ‘heard’ through a doctor’s stethoscope when a baby has died in the womb. Fences partition the grasslands of a shallow dale. The links of a river wind glistening towards the sand-dunes. In the newish graveyard I find ...”

“... Wilson, his First (and Employment) Secretary Barbara Castle, Jack Jones of the Transport Workers, Hugh Scanlon of the Engineers and Vic Feather, the recently elected TUC General Secretary. The hours of argument circled round the Government’s need – political as much as economic – for legally enforceable constraints on industrial action. Jones and ...”

“... he told me in Moscow), Philby lost all faith in reform through parliamentary methods when Ramsay MacDonald betrayed the working class by forming the National Government of 1931. His interest in the possibilities of revolution took him two years later, on vacation from Cambridge, to Vienna. The suppression of the Social Democratic Party’s uprising against ...”

“... yet also busy sites of literary production were at this date connected facts. In the Shetlands, Hugh MacDiarmid – praised by MacNeice in reviews – had published his Second Hymn to Lenin and would soon write his own prose book on the Scottish islands. In the Hebrides, Sorley MacLean had composed an elegy for MacNeice’s friend John Cornford, ‘marbh ...”

“... activist – were sacked.When war began, opinion on the left was divided. Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, who resigned as Labour leader over it, and many of the prominent members of the ILP and the other socialist organisations active in Glasgow opposed it, but most workers, trade unions, Labour MPs and 16 of the 18 ILP councillors in the city backed it ...”