“... introduced and speeches were made. Mr Gil Thompson, Chief Executive of Manchester Airport, cited James Agate, Asa Briggs and J.B. Priestley on the splendours of Manchester’s cultural past. Mr Thompson didn’t quote Engels. Nor, understandably, John Ruskin: ‘Manchester can produce no good art, and no good culture.’ Despite the presence at the press ...”

“... with the experience of existing in divided and distinguished worlds. Hobhouse’s Helen, like James’s Isabel Archer, is perpetually an alien. But there are big differences from the James novel, the most obvious being that The Furies is narrated in the first person, and could not be told in any other way. There is no ...”

“... brought it into the open made Powell the most controversial person in politics: he could pack any hall, command any headlines and at the same time be rejected as unclean by newspapers and politicians. Iain Macleod, who had in the past been close to him personally and politically, worried at the effect on him of such isolation, and dined alone with him to ...”

“... only learned of this fifteen years later. The hunt for the fifth persists. It was the tortured James Angleton – erstwhile head of CIA counter-intelligence, who had learnt part of his trade from Philby – who bitterly and despairingly credited the KGB with creating ‘a wilderness of mirrors’. Maybe, Angleton took too literally the extravagances of ...”

“... William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier biography, ‘a model of hard-nosed and painstaking investigation’. Hall was the first to reveal Stanley’s secret engagement to Alice Pike. Unfortunately, his excitement over this discovery led him to make ...”

“... but it was Rachel who haunted the English literary imagination throughout the 19th century. In James’s The Tragic Muse, the Jewish Cockney actress Miriam Rooth claims to be in the same style as ‘that woman’, and George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth foolishly thinks of herself as destined for stardom because she is more beautiful than the ‘thin ...”

“... and on industrial democracy and de-centralisation – causes that made little progress under James Callaghan. But while the Liberals are by now convinced of the genuine radicalism of the Four, they are unable to share in the hard-headed determination of the same Social Democratic leaders to exhibit themselves as overjoyed whenever a Labour office-holder ...”

“... the top of the greasy pole of academic life, represented by the Disraeli Fellowship at Holy Christ Hall, Cambridge. He succeeds. But throughout, Sefton comes from behind, not like the victorious dark horse, but like the furtively libidinous dog, taking his pleasures in dark and dirty places. Peeping Tom is set in Cornwall, a place Jacobson has oddly chosen to ...”

“... way and Southey settled for her younger sister. When brother and sister-in-law were sharing Greta Hall later in life, they both seem to have regretted missing each other, and Southey had some hard things to say about the deceased wife’s sister act. On the other hand, one doubts Sara ever really regretted becoming Mrs Coleridge, although she used to talk in ...”

“... giant building, that high-bounding wall/Those bare-worn walks, that lofty thund’ring hall …/… a prison, with a milder name’. Still, this game of identification shows how strong the legend of the workhouse is, and how obsessive the need to commemorate an iniquity long since ended, but never completely atoned for or sufficiently deplored. We ...”

“... forewoman in a sweet factory, goes beyond ‘jingoistic sentiments … paraded in the music hall and the public house’, Glover writes. ‘Here is an anti-semitism that is ready to leave the street corner for the political platform, to make its stand as something other than vulgar prejudice.’ It was fuelled by the popular perception that Jews ...”

“... He belonged, by natural kinship, in the company of high-art writers like Flaubert, Proust and James (or, as he contended for a while, Edith Sitwell, Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf), and therefore he could scarcely be expected to function at the same level as industrious pen-pushers like, say, Bennett or Galsworthy. He would much rather talk Proust over ...”

“... journalist Marchamont Nedham. All of these have been eclipsed in the recent preoccupation with James Harrington, the author of Oceana (1656), and his followers. The republicanism that emerges from Norbrook’s investigations is thus not confined to the militant saints and to those preoccupied with securing a Harringtonian ‘balance’ through ...”

“... opposite Eel Pie Island, then sit for a while in the gardens of Orleans House, the octagon by James Gibbs c.1720, and all that remains of the house lived and entertained in by Caroline of Ansbach. The garden has some tall trees, the upper branches of which are alive with bright green and yellow birds which twitter like hawks. I look them up when I come ...”

“... near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room’. Eliot had referred in 1918 to Henry James’s ‘merciless clairvoyance’ as a perception of relations rather than entities: ‘It is in the chemistry of these subtle substances, these curious precipitates and explosive gases which are suddenly formed by the contact of mind with mind, that ...”