“... old George’ of Poplar had come to personify grassroots Labour in much the same way as David Blunkett of the ‘socialist republic’ of South Yorkshire did in the late 1970s. Shepherd sees Lansbury’s evolution into a Cockney icon as a parable of the working-class boy made good by a conversion to socialism. But some of the photographs which ...”

“... when you set out to look the present in the eye but can’t quite bear the thought? Much of David Marquand’s powerful essay about ‘Britain, now’ is an elegy for a lost past, unsullied by ‘masterless capitalism’, a sad story of the light growing dim, good running to bad, the public realm hollowed out by vested interests, greed and unexamined ...”

“... liberal belief in the separation of the public from the private life’: poets like Zbigniew Herbert who wryly attempt to resist barbarism with no more than the salt of irony. Regrettably, Paulin has not included any of his own original work – extracts from The Book of Juniper would have thrown light on the principles underlying the anthology – but ...”

“... Boston University. The first of them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the military victory over France a victory over French culture, Nietzsche writes, is a pernicious delusion, ‘not simply ...”

“... the Primrose League (he was due to run for election as a Tory MP alongside Churchill’s father); Herbert Stewart, the commander of the Relief Force’s Desert Column, trying to reach Khartoum to rescue Gordon; and Hamill Stewart, Gordon’s second in command, who was killed along with the journalist Frank Power while trying to escape the city by breaking the ...”

“... businessmen visited the country to drum up trade, they found that the Labour Foreign Secretary Dr David Owen’s distaste for Argentina’s record on human rights was an obstacle to their embassy: there was pressure on Owen to change his critical attitude. A consortium of British banks led by Lloyds organised a 75 million dollar loan soon after the Videla ...”

“... stories as words are at conveying pictures. An observer who had not already heard the story of David and Goliath would see in the Speculum picture nothing more specific than a king who has just cut off the head of a giant (the latter identified not so much by his size as by his club). Indeed, even if one does already know a story, it is by no means always ...”

“... Through Max Ernst, a friend of Boué’s, he met the Surrealist poets and painters, and with Herbert Read and David Gascoyne, introduced Surrealism to England. He helped persuade Picasso (it didn’t take much) to contribute to the 1936 exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in Piccadilly, which launched the ...”

“... to put people right about other people is incorrigible, indeed obsessional. In his review of David Cecil’s biography of Max Beerbohm Malcolm Muggeridge allowed it to be a graceful job of work, but said it missed the real point about Beerbohm and his lifestyle, which was that he concealed his Jewish origins and was a crypto-homosexual. Of ...”

“... into fire – more, certainly, than the government expected. It is thus an opportune moment for David Miers to publish Regulating Commercial Gambling, a legal history of how we got where we are. Miers and his colleague David Dixon are probably the two leading authorities on the legal history of British gambling, and this ...”

“... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David Cameron of his generation, blessed with born-to-the-purple public school assumptions and a casual, unimaginative indifference to the everyday struggles of the masses. Not that there was ever any ‘swank’ about Attlee, but at Oxford between 1901 and 1904 ...”

“... knew the Old Testament. Upavon’s chapel is called the Cave of Adullam, the stronghold where David sought refuge from Saul’s armies (1 Samuel), presumably as a reminder of the persecution suffered by dissenters; Little Zoar, near Calne, is evidence of the fortress mentality of those strict Calvinists among the Baptists who believed that only the Elect ...”

“... war, the forecasts true and false, and the marshalling of counter-measures. We have, for example, Herbert Morrison, the conscientious objector of the First World War who urged everyone to ‘go to it’ in the second, presiding over the curiously named Rocket Consequences Committee, which sometimes envisaged fearful onslaughts calling for the mass evacuation ...”

“... was beset with what proved to be chronic financial crisis and controversy: to such an extent that Herbert Morrison at one stage feared a collapse of confidence in the Labour Government comparable with that of 1931. Such issues were rarely reducible, however, to simple issues of party politics. Disputes over funding divided, not just Labour from ...”