“... 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 ...”

“... he does not flinch from analysing those who reached the top – MacDonald, Attlee, Gaitskell, Wilson. But he has just as much to say about those dedicated but less well-known people who did so much to build up the Labour Party’s machine: Henderson, Morrison, Dalton and Rita Hinden. And in the figure of Morgan Phillips this third major strength of the ...”

“... notably, Semir Zeki – have pointed art studies in a significant new direction. John Onians and Barbara Maria Stafford, both art historians, certainly think so, though Neuroarthistory and Echo Objects argue the case in quite different ways. What might the far view be, from this new bend in the road? Suppose we could arrive at adequate physical descriptions ...”

“... the most extensive case in Shakespeare of the VD joke: ‘sorry fooling’ indeed, as Dover Wilson remarked. Certainly there is relevance to the play’s brothels. But it might be possible to go further, and believe that this passage of reference to sexual disease introduces early into Measure for Measure what might be called the Body’s ...”

“... in modern America, with talking heads ranging from Vanessa Redgrave to Stanley Wells and Barbara Everett. It’s an odd mixture, but somehow it works, both as a legible rendition of the play and as a portrait of the craft of translating Shakespeare for modern audiences.Looking for Richard took Pacino years to finish because he had to squeeze in the ...”

“... past my eyes, I found myself remembering each of them in their days as radical reformers: Brian Wilson, once abrasive editor of the West Highland Free Press and socialist champion of the Scottish Highlands, now defending the Government’s policies on the bridge to Skye; Nick Raynsford, whom I recall coming to see me at the Daily Mirror to seek more ...”

“... recognisable as an amalgam of the passing generation of Labour heavyweights, from Benn himself to Barbara Castle and bruisers like Denis Healey and Eric Heffer. Its atmosphere derived from the lurid tales of spookery and skulduggery that emerged in the dying days of Harold Wilson’s premiership, when the longstanding ...”

“... denies any particular bias against Labour governments, and is sorry to have fallen out with Harold Wilson (who later expressed sadness that he hadn’t known Pincher was a fellow Yorkshireman, telling him: ‘It would have made a difference, you know’). But while it may be true that he needled Tory as well as Labour administrations, provoking Harold ...”

“... four, but that’s what we do.’ Her account of London in the period is as sharp as anything by Barbara Comyns or Muriel Spark. Her phonetic transcriptions of accents, while dated, bring into earshot a teeming cast of characters – East Enders, posh North Londoners, Italian immigrants and so on.As a child Gilroy was considered ‘sickly’, and at the age ...”

“... and Russia have always been at odds is a peculiar one, though current events give it extra appeal. Barbara Emerson’s book is weakest in considering the one point of real comparison between the mid-19th-century global order and the post-1945 one. During both periods, the greatest differences between Britain and Russia were not geopolitical but ideological ...”

“... thought her more a manager than a leader. Tony Crosland, her chief at education during the first Wilson government, was frustrated by her tendency to get mired in detail. Contrast this with the record of Barbara Castle, Labour’s top woman at a string of second-rank ministries a few years earlier. Like Williams, Castle ...”

“... Honeysuckle and the Bee’. Not everyone likes this extraordinary story. Both Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis have protested at its terse, incomprehensible oddity, and called it frankly bad. But most other admirers of Kipling, and indeed of good fiction in general, find it in its strange way consummate, haunting and powerful. But a powerful ...”

“... political leaders from dreaming of capturing British markets. Yet as Stevenson points out, Woodrow Wilson was determined on defeating Germany (or, as he often preferred to see it, ‘Prussian militarism’) as a precondition for a lasting peace. Austria-Hungary was fighting for its survival against the threat of nationalism represented so clearly by Serbia’s ...”

“... rights for women and so on, they were often reluctant to be ‘cast in the feminist role’, as Barbara Castle put it. Class had always been the primary determinant of Labour Party policy: you improved the position of women by helping their class, and you did that chiefly by helping their fathers and husbands earn a decent ‘family wage’. Labour women ...”

“... 19 entered Leeds University, where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse ...”