“... a prophylactic distance. The SDP/Liberal Alliance is judged to have ‘foundered on the pique of David Steel and the pride of David Owen’: it is not clear why a note to this effect had to be appended to this other parody of Woddis’s, for the parody itself implies as much. Or as little, since there are those of us who ...”

“... from government: from the government, that is, of the rump UK, minus Scotland. The reason is that David Cameron, attempting to outflank the SNP during a midwinter silly season offensive, has managed to provoke Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, into a daring dash for independence. Salmond is not – as the English fail miserably to understand – an ...”

“... and Beautiful Thoughts (‘conscientious though I be, I am but flesh and blood’)? When Dwight Macdonald identified ‘amiability’ as the distinctive quality of New Yorker criticism, he wasn’t thinking of Parker.It’s not all virtuoso demolition work. While she always insisted that she wasn’t a ‘real’ critic, Parker is more astute than most on ...”

“... Graham’s old college – in the collection of memorabilia of such Christian writers as George MacDonald, T.S. Eliot, Charles Williams and Tolkien. It is evidence of some sort of fame. A.N. Wilson sees ‘unmistakable and remarkable evidence of something like sanctification which occurred in him towards the end of his days’, but that I do not pretend to ...”

“... an attempt to steer the party away from socialism – the attempt on which William Rodgers and David Owen seem to be embarked, and which has led Roy Jenkins and David Marquand to abandon the party. A desperate public cry to Shirley Williams: why have you got so lost in that company, one with ineffable self-confidence but ...”

“... controls these proceedings with a Catoesque monomania and a forensically inflexible vocabulary. As David Edgar has pointed out, Dutt is the one person in the whole drama who takes exactly the same line at the beginning, the middle and the end. He is determined, not just that the Central Committee should bow to Big Brother but that they should love him ...”

“... of characters. This was a game he played best with the politicians of the Twenties – Baldwin and MacDonald, Lloyd George and Churchill, Austen Chamberlain, Birkenhead and Joynson-Hicks – all of whose essential traits became brilliantly interchangeable, as though none of them really existed except in Low’s drawings of them. A perfect example of this ...”

“... Police – Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were but two of the kind of thing he was after. David Low portrayed him as a funeral mute with thick crêpe on his hat. Even that little classic The Specialist was a cause of some anxiety at Putnam, and a sigh of relief went up when the Times Literary Supplement dubbed it ‘innocently Rabelaisian’. We may ...”

“... him the deanery, through the rare coincidence of a Labour prime minister in the shape of Ramsay MacDonald and a leftish archbishop of York, William Temple. This is an excellent biography, crisp, sometimes cutting, but never less than fair and always as sympathetic as humanly possible to its subject even in his most maddening moments. Aided by access to the ...”

“... and his domination of economic policy remind one alarmingly of the relationship between Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden in 1931: between a Prime Minister who senses that there is probably a better alternative but who lacks the authority or self-confidence to choose it and a Chancellor of formidable personality who is a rigidly orthodox practitioner of ...”

“... Report is what it hid.‘Americans have a technique for concealing by revealing,’ Dwight Macdonald once remarked. ‘We publish so much accurate information that only the most acute and diligent reader can find the needle of Truth in the haystack of Facts.’ The haystacks are now much larger than Macdonald would ...”

“... in which the British played up, but hardly played the game. Thus the tale of poor Sir Hector MacDonald, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in Ceylon, driven to suicide in 1903 after being discovered romping with four Sinhalese boys in a railway carriage, leads into a broad discussion of sex and masculinity in the Empire. And an evocation of the ...”

“... that she be given a non-custodial sentence, so it came as a shock when, on 5 March 2018, Sheriff David Pender jailed her for sixteen months.Katie’s childhood had been as stable as William’s was volatile. She and her younger brother grew up in a semi-detached house on the southern edge of Glasgow, with their parents, Stuart, a data analyst, and Linda, a ...”

“... is sometimes justified by a recourse to non-facts. He tells Ronald Butt that, among others, Ramsay MacDonald and Herbert Morrison were Marxists: a good debating-point, but wrong. Indeed, one of the many striking things about the diaries is how often Labour leaders attempt to validate their opinions by such a recourse to the Party’s history; and how ...”

“... and easy violence: taverns and clubs seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts it. Strutting and tumbling through it all ...”