“... in 1967, Attlee began to be missed and appreciated. As the Labour Party ran slowly downhill under Wilson, Callaghan and Foot, Attlee shuffled uphill to join the immortals. Comparisons between past and present told heavily in Attlee’s favour, and the golden age of 1945 took its place in Labour mythology. Both Left and Right of the Party looked back to 1945 ...”

“... crowned in 1961, he had already made influential friends. In 1943, as the son of Sultan Mohammed ben Yusef, he had been introduced to Roosevelt and Churchill at the Anfa Conference in Casablanca; in 1945, aged fifteen, he was decorated by de Gaulle. Not long after his coronation he was welcomed in Washington by President Kennedy; France, for its part, had ...”

“... post-medieval national poets in regions that do not speak the language in which he wrote. In 1623 Ben Jonson’s commendatory poem in the First Folio tried to imagine the Shakespeare canon as amounting to a decisive patriotic victory over his country’s international rivals: ‘Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show/To whom all scenes of Europe homage ...”

“... it included than for those it didn’t (Hemingway, Dewey, Mencken, Salinger, Thurber, Edmund Wilson, Nabokov) and for those who, having joined, resigned (Thomas Hart Benton, Lewis Mumford, John O’Hara, Yvor Winters, Ezra Pound). Nor was it famous for anything it actually did: for years its main business was merely to perpetuate itself by suitable ...”

“... The word is ordinarily used of sentences that stop before they end, and grammarians, from Ben Jonson to Martin Amis, normally disapprove of such sentences; but aposiopesis may be allowed as a structural feature, as when Yeats ends his ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ by claiming that he cannot continue his roll call of Gregory’s friends ...”

“... short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber and James Ramsden). Within a year Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government had abolished the post altogether, amalgamating its duties into the Ministry of Defence. Profumo killed off his job at the same time that he was destroying his own career. What Profumo always had going for him as war ...”

“... relationship between Eleanor and Franklin. We get the joke when Franklin, giving Eleanor a bust of Ben Franklin for the bedroom she does not share with him, teases: ‘You can always say I have Franklin with me.’ In the absence of a sexual connection to Eleanor, Franklin makes her his legs, ‘eyes and ears’ around the country; she makes him listen to the ...”

“... nature of its affections. During the sharp conflicts of twenty-five years ago, Harold Wilson was not a newspaper hero in his dealings with Hugh Gaitskell. But after Gaitskell’s death, a single speech on the white heat of the technological revolution transformed his reputation. As Prime Minister, from 1964, he enjoyed complete domination of the ...”

“... absolute loss. We have in general come to accept the account of Shakespeare gently offered by Ben Jonson, later hardened and simplified by Milton, as a poet without learning, warbling his ‘native woodnotes wild’. Jonson and Milton both knew far more Latin and Greek than Shakespeare, so perhaps they could afford such judgments. I am not sure that we ...”

“... about the income which sustained the first seven years of her administration, but the fact that Ben Pimlott, Philip Ziegler and Austen Morgan, three heavyweight biographers of Harold Wilson, under whose premiership the petroleum exploitation and taxation regime was set up, fail to mention it. In Scotland, up until the ...”

“... young man reading PPE at Oxford he wrote admiring letters to the Australian Labor prime minister, Ben Chifley. In 1970 the Sun supported Harold Wilson and in 1972 Murdoch’s papers, notably the Australian (a national daily he had founded in 1964), supported Gough Whitlam. There is, though, a psychological and temperamental ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... same frame as Albert and Harold of Steptoe and Son, Oscar and Felix of The Odd Couple, or Arthur Wilson and George Mainwaring of Dad’s Army is to see that the comedy is the result of a relationship rather than the brittle patter of variety cross-talk. Influence in comedy, as in literature, takes some unexpected twists and, like the tradition described by ...”

“... Parliamentary Socialism that the Labour Party never really had been socialist; much more recently, Ben Pimlott, in Labour and the Left in the 1930s, has argued that attacks on Labour for abandoning its socialism are misplaced, since the original and basic purpose of the Party was simply to get working men into Parliament. In essence, Pimlott is right. Yet ...”

“... Macmillan could do a superb impersonation of the languid patrician he actually was, while Harold Wilson could imitate his true identity as a bluff, plain-speaking Yorkshireman to perfection. David Cameron once worked for a public relations agency and looks as though he was assembled by one. From Reagan to Schwarzenegger, the line between politics and ...”