“... The consensus since the miners’ strike ended in March has been overwhelming: it was a disaster, most of all for the miners themselves. It is irresistible, in the interests of fairness at least, to look at the possibility that that verdict is wrong. Let us suppose – as Arthur Scargill invites us to – that it was forced upon them: that, as he also claims, it was a victory ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... signing, who gave a Bentley for auction at their winter ball last month, is the voter-repelling Lloyd-Webber. After six hours in the Ministry we emerge into the Sunday dawn with a stream of people, looking more tired now. The sun is up behind the buttresses of Southwark Cathedral. We buy a paper and wait for the Greenwich bus, reading about some Anglican ...”

“... house. By contrast, the neatly finished perspective drawing from the office of his pupil Frank Lloyd Wright, showing how the Johnson Wax building would look when the tower was added is now less interesting than a photograph of the finished building – though it may well have been useful for the client. One of the Futurist architect Sant’Elia’s ...”

“... a truce was called from 11 July 1921 and, after preliminary discussions between de Valera and Lloyd George, negotiations took place in London between 11 October and 6 December of that year. De Valera remained in Dublin, however; the negotiating team was made up of Griffith, its leader, Collins and three others. The delegates were appointed ...”

“... Lord and by the time he finished Churchill was out of favour with the club for having supported Lloyd George’s bid to replace Asquith as leader. It was decided not to hold the expected presentation ceremony and the picture was hung in an inconspicuous committee room. In 1917, when Churchill became minister of munitions, an official unveiling was mooted ...”

“... last thirty years is to compare the introductions to the first and most recent editions of Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward’s Guide to the Architecture of London. In 1983, they wrote of a city in decline, its population down by about a sixth from its postwar height. ‘London is cleaner and uglier than it was at the beginning of the century; but it is ...”

“... as a kind of wartime reincarnation of Christopher Smart. Gurney trained as a musician, David Jones and Isaac Rosenberg as artists; they all served in the ranks and were excluded from the mainstream of literary life after the war – Rosenberg was dead, Gurney mad, Jones given to arcane pursuits. Once again, it was the ...”

“... or leading politicians who has only limited concern for things Welsh. Aneurin Bevan followed Lloyd George’s example in having little time for the Welsh dimension, though the suffering of the mining valleys between the wars was the source of his whole social philosophy. Labour has stood for state intervention in the economy only in centralised ...”

“... an extent which has frustrated biographers looking for simple explanations of his beliefs. Stuart Jones has now tackled the problem with an intellectual biography based on a thorough reading of Bryce’s large output, which succeeds admirably because Jones is such a fastidious historian himself. Primarily a contextual study ...”

“... with the Sixties spirit, and the most active and persuasive union leaders were leftist, like Jack Jones (transport workers), Hugh Scanlon (engineers) and Clive Jenkins (white-collar workers). – Industrial militancy was on the increase. Benn had been aware of the looming crisis on the Clyde, a product of purblind management’s refusal to modernise: in ...”

“... narrative voice in Nothing to Be Frightened Of is less complacent than Metroland’s Christopher Lloyd, less irascible than Geoffrey Braithwaite, but has the same enviable suavity that marks out all Barnes’s writing. And the fear of death isn’t a new thing for him to own up to: in Metroland, Christopher confesses to a sudden, rising terror which takes ...”

“... gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself. Wary Bolshevik officials summoned the newly appointed British envoy in ...”

“... agreement about the infection idea. Shakespeare’s most recent biographer, Katherine Duncan-Jones, who incidentally thinks the young friend was William Herbert, not Southampton, has a good learned note in her edition about contemporary accounts of men getting burned by the female genitalia – ‘thus was his paradice turned into his purgatory . . . his ...”

“... the Lord Weinstock, the Lord Aldington, the Lord Kearton, not to mention plain Mr Harvey-Jones of ICI – were deeply unhappy about some of the Government’s economic policies. Nonsense, replied Mr Lawson robustly: they may whinge in public, but in private all these industrialists will tell you that we’re really putting up a jolly good ...”