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“... becoming part of the talentocracy he was drawn to. Laurence Olivier commissioned him (along with Kenneth Tynan) to write a musical on nuclear war; the Spectator appointed him film critic, and his friend David Astor got him permanent residence and made him a regular reporter on the Observer. Lessing and Sigal inspired and tormented each other in equal ...”

“... recording ‘Nights in the Gardens of Spain’ with Penelope Wilton, directed by Tristram Powell. She does it beautifully and Tristram keeps it simple and static, which is exactly right. [Predictably, when it comes to be transmitted it is this monologue, the simplest in form and entirely perfect in execution, which the sad creatures who preview TV ...”

“... of course, is what all these eight hundred-odd pages are really about. It was, I think, Enoch Powell who once remarked that all political careers by their very nature end in failure. One is nevertheless entitled to ask what was achieved on the way to the inevitable failure. In Dr Owen’s case there is a simple but very substantial answer: he kept Mrs ...”

“... mismatch of Abbott and Costello and closer to the exasperated camaraderie of Laurel and Hardy; as Kenneth Tynan put it, they were ‘no longer comic and stooge, but egoists in more or less equal competition’. They still told jokes and performed in sketches that required only caricature-acting, but now their roles were blurring to the point at which they ...”

“... he sips and nibbles, sits up and begins to feel better. Observe the cunning sequence in which Kenneth Grahame presents the effect of food on emotion: first an olfactory promise and suggestiveness, then the real thing, and in basic form. Hot buttered toast is surely what one would dream of on a desert island, rather than caviar and Krug. After serving on a ...”

“... he was, despite his reputation as an imperialist brute. Superior Person, the biography by Kenneth Rose, makes little mention of the bons mots, but some of them exist in what Curzon would have cringed to hear called the popular memory. ‘Gentlemen do not take soup at luncheon’; ‘Dear me, I never knew that the lower classes had such white ...”

“... LOLLY. The doctrine remains: give money back to ‘the people’. The Sun constantly accuses Kenneth Clarke of timidity in his fiscal policy – the Chancellor’s November Budget was ‘as inspiring as a cod kipper’; and by attempting to push Major to the right using the rhetoric of the people’s hatred of being ‘shackled’ by the state it has ...”

“... an alternative to the more respectable version that has tended to focus on Loach and Leigh, Powell and Pressburger, Lean and Reed, the Boultings and Woodfall (although Tom Jones does get a long and interesting discussion here). Or at least, that’s the way this book might have been seen fifteen years ago. Now, in fact, many of the works he writes about ...”

“... coherent syndrome call it populist authoritarianism, and date its rise from the emergence of Enoch Powell as a national hero after his ‘river of blood’ speech in 1968. I wonder whether it is all as simple as that. The question is not whether there is a logical connection between these attitudes, libertarian in economic and repressive in constitutional ...”

“... Thatcher still likes or admires. The soul-mates are virtually all conservative odd-balls: Enoch Powell, whose ‘greatest regret was that [he] wasn’t killed in the war’, the batty Keith Joseph, the transparently pretentious Laurens van der Post, the relentlessly downmarket Norman Tebbit and Alfred Sherman who, though Jewish himself, risked his career to ...”

“... More than three hundred African political and trade union leaders were in attendance, including Kenneth Kaunda, Hastings Banda and Frantz Fanon. The number of women delegates was small, but Eslanda Robeson, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Maida Springer and Marthe Ouandié made sure some of their concerns were addressed. The conference was chaired by Tom Mboya, a ...”

“... SIB board to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Gordon Brown as genial and forthright in his way as Kenneth Clarke had been last year in his. First sight of lightly-bearded Alistair Darling, who strikes me as if chosen from a thousand aspirants to be cast as Iago at Covent Garden: is it, I wonder, an advantage in political life to look quite so operatically ...”

“... from a very different direction. The Royal Court articulated the anguish and exclusion of, in Kenneth Tynan’s words, ‘the non-U intelligentsia who live in bedsitters and divide the Sunday papers into two groups, “posh” and “wet”’; Stratford East celebrated the festive energy of the put-upon and the oppressed, for whom the Sunday papers meant ...”

“... was of a different kind. His friends included the black novelist Richard Wright and critics like Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman; his heroes were Joyce and Eliot; he studied The Golden Bough for the mythical themes he hoped would make his novel immortal. Ellison aspired mightily and he dressed the part as he imagined it: Man of Letters, with carefully ...”

“... His creations were of the scale the fall of empire demanded; better than Ian Smith or Enoch Powell. But among them also belongs his Archie Rice in The Entertainer, imperialist turned malcontent, lamenting the Empire’s passing while railing at the dishonour it descended to at Suez. When he said, ‘Don’t clap too hard, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a ...”