“... though it might pass muster externally, could be vastly improved.’ As you can see, it has been a strong week for the Self – or, more accurately, for that ancient English art of seeming to give the Self the really hard time it deserves. Self-deprecation, self-accusation, self-effacement – is it not strange, in a way, that the English should have written ...”

“... Thompson’s work had a profound resonance among American historians during the 1970s; there was a strong German influence on historical method across Europe and America in the second half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th. International conferences and cheap foreign travel have long since broken down the national isolation Burguière ...”

“... Tony Crosland’s epoch-making book The Future of Socialism was published in 1956. That Roy Hattersley’s aim is to don the master’s mantle in the late 1980s is evident not only from his book’s subtitle, but also from his brief account of a conversation he had with Tony Crosland a week before the latter’s fatal stroke ...”

“... support Hitler. Faced with movements aiming more or less at separation, national feeling remained strong in the young, whether they were Gaullist, Pétainist or neutral. After the Liberation, France was to be reunited without difficulty. People forget a little too readily that the attempts at territorial division did not come only from the Axis ...”

“... of certain inconsistencies and biases in Saussure that post-structuralism comes). Given the strong measure of overlap between Saussure and Chomsky, and that both of them look on language as our richest, most profound and most influential institution, there is good reason to hope that the one might now step into the place of the other, as the theorist of ...”

“... In a 1979 review of Roy Fisher’s collection of poems The Thing about Joe Sullivan, probably the most likeable collection by a not always likeable poet, John Ash wrote: ‘In a better world, he would be as widely known and highly praised as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.’ This would be a very strange world, and not necessarily a better one ...”

“... don’t know,’ he says, ‘but I think maybe the girls are weak and grisi siknis makes them strong.’ O’Sullivan agrees, and notes the usefulness of a biopsychosocial understanding of medicine which recognises that someone may act out a conflict in such a way as to alert others to it, while at the same time summoning the community to their ...”

“... pouring out insults to him on the phone’. There are occasional lunches and dinners à deux with Roy Jenkins, sometimes at the Connaught (‘another demonstration of what he calls, with a smile, his “expensive tastes” ’) and sometimes at No 11 Downing Street, at one of which ‘we agreed about a number of things, notably on our contempt for Jim ...”

“... Mr Moorcock is biding his time, waiting to return. The call of the wild to the mild remains strong. Indeed, what makes these California reflections so quietly powerful is Moorcock’s ability to live frankly within the unresolved ironies of the Anglo-American gap. ‘It won’t be long before I’m back ... I can’t think of a better place from which ...”

“... as party leader. He got 71 per cent of the votes in the new electoral college; the runner-up – Roy Hattersley – got 19 per cent. Healey did not even bother to stand. Michael Leapman does not duck the fact that Kinnock has made some mistakes and had some failures. In the 1984-85 miners’ strike, for example, he got the worst of both worlds. Many of his ...”

“... in his speeches. ‘Lazy? Lazy?’ Bevan responded to a sneer about the laziness of his colleague Roy Jenkins: ‘How can a boy from Abersychan who acquired an accent like that be lazy?’ From Princess Margaret comes a comment on the moribundity of the London Season: ‘Every tart in London can get in.’ Kynaston appreciates the respect for working-class ...”

“... the US had been very good to Ukraine, and it would be nice if he got a ‘favour’ in return – Roy Cohn’s mother taught Roy the concept of ‘the favour bank’ and it seems to have been passed on to Trump. The thing he wanted was help with his own effort to find out information about former Vice President Biden’s ...”

“... Benn took part in a radio discussion on the working of Parliament, together with John Biffen and Roy (Lord) Jenkins. Asked by the chairman, Peter Hennessy, if he did not think that the Lords now functioned as a ‘focus of opposition’, Benn responded that it was, instead, ‘part of an attack on democracy. After all, why bother to vote in the next election ...”

“... To be sure, he was a robust and formidable party warhorse – a kind of William Harcourt or Roy Hattersley, say – with enormous energy, considerable administrative drive and a powerful debating style. But he captured no imaginations, lifted no horizons and inspired no disciples. He left worthy memorials – the National Parks, for instance, and the ...”

“... different its assumptions were from those of the 20th century. But there is no snide debunking in Roy Jenkins’s biography. The Gladstone who emerges – temperamentally commanding, conversationally charming, intellectually erudite, theologically obsessed, morally priggish, sexually tormented, socially hierarchical, politically populist, administratively ...”