“... dignity beyond doubt by exclaiming – “Oh! Valentino!” ’ Even party intellectuals like Beatrice Webb allowed themselves to be charmed by him, but then thought the worse of him for it: ‘So much perfection,’ she said, ‘argues rottenness somewhere.’ Ellen Wilkinson was more amusing: ‘The trouble with Oswald Mosley is that he is too ...”

“... subject matter obscure and then deftly double-crossing anyone foolish enough to have trusted him. Beatrice Webb understood him well: ‘He is a blatant intriguer – and every word he says is of the nature of an offer “to do a deal”. He neither likes nor dislikes you; you are a mere instrument, one among many – sometimes of value, sometimes not ...”

“... from the late Victorian and Edwardian social surveys made by Charles Booth, Seebohm Rowntree and Beatrice Webb. It was buttressed by the traditions of anthropological fieldwork – most notably the Mass Observation project, founded by Tom Harrisson and others in 1937 – and furthered by the History Workshop movement launched in 1966 by Raphael ...”

“... compared Peel’s smile to the silver plate on a coffin. Samuel’s ‘sense of humour’, Beatrice Webb noted, ‘takes the irritating form of tactless irony at the expense of the people he is talking to’. It is a feat to have dealt perceptively with all the phases of so long a career. Under this guidance we can understand Samuel’s thoughts ...”

“... poor morals: Joseph Chamberlain sported a monocle and an orchid but behaved badly to the future Beatrice Webb. The Liberal prime minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman ate so much that he ballooned to twenty stone.The ruling class was free to behave in this appalling way, Heffer asserts, because of ‘the decline of the spiritual’, though he doesn’t ...”

“... depraved’ (the book, it should be said, contains no description of sexual activity at all). Beatrice Webb, the Fabian queen bee, thought The New Machiavelli ‘lays bare the tragedy of H.G.’s life – his aptitude for “fine thinking” and even “good feeling” and yet his total incapacity for decent conduct’. The fellow was clearly a ...”

“... and turned aside. The fact that the strike was conducted virtually without violence and, as Beatrice Webb put it in her diary, opened ‘with a football match between the police and the strikers’ and ended ‘with densely packed reconciliation services at all the chapels and churches of Great Britain’, was taken not only by almost the whole of ...”

“... Stalin’, when in reality he had not been in Russia three months before he was writing to tell Beatrice Webb, his wife’s aunt, of his ‘overwhelming conviction that the government and all it stands for . . . is evil and a denial of everything I care for in life’. Chambers also has an occasional weakness for the cliché: ‘In 1914, Serbia stood ...”

“... of society, for which help from intellectuals is essential. ‘Reforming society,’ wrote Beatrice Webb, ‘is not a light matter, and must be taken by experts specially trained for the purpose.’ Nonetheless the intellectuals’ contribution to the Labour Party was more muted, their relationship with colleagues more deferential. This is partly ...”

“... habit of that generation of intellectuals, which can be found again in so different a figure as Beatrice Webb, of delineating a sphere of public intellectual life from which merely personal matters are excluded. Lukacs himself at times talks in that way in the interviews, but there is a different and very positive tone in his autobiographical notes for ...”

“... Address to the Middle Classes on the Subject of Gymnastics’. Partly through his old acquaintance Beatrice Webb, he dallied with the Fabians and even sipped at their poisonous brew of eugenics. He had long believed that ‘the over and reckless production of children is debasing our race.’ All this came poorly from someone who was now conspicuously ...”

“... dubbed ‘social collectivism’, as distinct from the unitary ‘state socialism’ of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The complement of this vision was what Barker was quite happy to call ‘the discredited state’ – meaning, not that the sovereign state was in disgrace, but simply that there was a diminishing need for the state to be asserting ...”

“... Leverborough, a byword for hubris and ingratitude. As guests of the Haute Juiverie, Sidney and Beatrice Webb suffered agonies of conscience. They dined at Sir Julius Wernher’s Luton Hoo, which they denounced as ‘a machine for the futile expenditure of wealth’, and were equally appalled at the same magnate’s Bath House in Piccadilly, where ...”

“... handmaid’ to the courts. Prison ‘debases the currency of human feeling’, Sidney and Beatrice Webb declared in English Prisons under Local Government (1922). Policies like remission and probation, as well as the decision to allow people convicted of crimes time to raise money for fines, challenged the dominance of incarceration as a penal ...”

“... an entire ministry. Many was the pamphlet and committee-report produced on the subject, though Beatrice Webb complained that nobody ever seemed to read them. Hynes recaptures the whole thing in its aptest possible form, a Sanatogen advertisement: ‘And now for Reconstruction! But first Reconstruct Your Nervous System.’ Hynes is gifted in iconology ...”