“... for change? Well, possibly. In an Australian Financial Review article, the former Labor leader Mark Latham maintained that the last year has been marked by a crippling ‘convergence’ between the Liberal-National alliance and Labor. Just as Blairism took over so much of Thatcherism, so the new Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has been striving to ...”

“... opposition concentrates the mind wonderfully, Disraeli and the Conservatives were quicker off the mark in this respect than the Liberals. There was no Liberal equivalent of John Gorst, the man who created the Conservative party machine in the early Seventies and to whom their victory in 1874 was largely due. Gladstone did not think in those terms at all at ...”

“... He had written to many of the notables of the day to tell them the good news – a mixed bag: Winston Churchill, Semprini, Wilfred Pickles, Val Doonican – and he would show you a sheaf of their acknowledgments. ‘He’s batchy,’ Dad would say, meaning ‘he’s barmy,’ but it certainly kept him happy.7 February. Ploughing on with the Francis Bacon ...”

“... brilliant reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four which casts some doubt on this reading of Kafka. He sees Winston and Julia’s illicit, furtive love affair, and the efforts of Orwell’s thought police to do away with sex and sexuality, as an account of the lives of gay men in London in 1948, the year the novel was written. Woods quotes passages like this: ‘He ...”

“... is here for tears, nothing to wail or knock the breast.’ Samson’s father, like Mark Antony, assumes that his audience could choose to mourn their dead hero either by weeping or not weeping, and that he can offer cogent reasons to move them one way or the other. In that sense, ‘a tear is an intellectual thing,’ as Blake puts it in ‘The ...”

“... premiership this century. Even Attlee, though dry and uncharismatic, had been deputy premier under Winston Churchill through the greatest world war in human history, while John Major isn’t just a grey man with very little public persona – he is a man with extraordinarily little experience beyond his trainee stints at DHSS, the Foreign Office and the ...”

“... comparatively safe community we form with its makers. The script is full of ironic glances that mark and alleviate the cruel logic of the action – like the policeman early on who admonishes Janet Leigh for sleeping in her car: ‘There are plenty of motels in this area. You should’ve – I mean just to be safe – Anthony Perkins, who plays Norman Bates ...”

“... 1534 and a tiny piece of enamel concealed inside an early Elizabethan ring which once belonged to Winston Churchill. It was Sir Philip Sidney who said (not with Anne in mind but her daughter), ‘she was a queen and therefore beautiful,’ and much diplomatic comment on her exquisite good looks can be dismissed along with the misattributed portraits. There ...”

“... of his friend Colonel Hankey eventually led to Swinton’s proposal coming to the attention of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. Which is how, in January 1915, the future tank became a naval project. Swinton did not learn of this development until late in May, but Churchill had made considerable progress in the meantime. A new Landships ...”

“... on the evidence of Lewis’s perceptive and absorbing biography, that verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to Cliveden in 1936, complaining about the ‘ghastly unreality about it all … like living on the stage of the Scala theatre ...”

“... but mainly it plays over the old man and the Paxtons’ daughter Alice. Between them, these two mark off a momentous span of English historical time. Alice is born on the eve of Eden’s Suez speech, the old man dies in the year of the three-day week. Within these chronological boundaries, their careers follow different courses. For 17 years the old man ...”

“... of alcohol, without which its wretched soldiers and sailors could never have been kept up to the mark. All the tropical products except cotton were deleterious or, at best, useless. As in Richard Dunn’s book, we are given gruesome details about the vicious, often sadistic regime of the plantations which produced them. Speaking of the Antigua revolt of ...”

“... their entrance to this country blocked, not facilitated, by the traditions of Latin pedagogy. When Winston Churchill began Latin, at the age of seven, he opened his grammar and found himself staring, bug-eyed, at the first declension, which his textbook exemplified but did not explain: Mensa a table Mensa o table Mensam a table Mensae of a table Mensae to or ...”

“... O-level English, so that stayed. Nineteen Eighty-Four was suspect, because of the scene between Winston and Julia among the bluebells, but it was a school copy, so that had to stay too. I also threw out half my records and tapes and ceased wearing eccentric clothes. I stopped having silly haircuts and removed my earring. I started attending a church youth ...”

“... Breakfast of Champions and reaching its nadir with Slaptick. D is, it must be said, a very low mark – and nothing short of abject when you give it to yourself. The first of these two novels actually wore on its sleeve the author’s doubt about its strengths, and his sense that he should push his work in some new direction. When I first encountered ...”