“... on the American architect’s work ends with the comment: ‘I have seen buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright’s that I would like to touch with the enchanted wand, not to alter their structure in plan or form or carcass, but to clothe them with a more living and tender detail.’ This truth to the ideals of a handcrafted world, and the social relations ...”

“... us do this.’ ‘Our policy,’ he added, quoting a speech made by his foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, to the United Nations a few months earlier, ‘is non-racial.’Macmillan attempted to soften the blow. The rise of national consciousness wasn’t a repudiation of South Africa or of Britain. On the contrary, the wind of change was only the latest of ...”

“... the same woman that he has been advised by a British superior (a Merlin-like officer called Morgan Lloyd) that he ought to gain experience in the Spanish Civil War. The woman naturally supposes that he will fight for the Spanish Republic and is furious when he explains that Britain needs him to serve with Franco’s mob. We already have hundreds of volunteers ...”

“... tomorrow would be as different as land and sky. That evening, safe in his Bel Air rental (a Frank Lloyd Wright designed house previously owned by the shah of Iran), he said to Geller: ‘I don’t want to perform any more. I want to leave the world. Find me a monastery. I want to become a monk.’ But his ascetic mood soon passed (as every Elvis mood ...”

“... Later, three legs became two when Harold Wilson and the trade unions’ grandest grandee, Jack Jones, reached the agreement known as the Social Contract, whereby workers agreed to moderate their wage demands so that the two-figure inflation rates could be beaten. Opinion polls decided Jones was the most powerful man in ...”

“... his career. On the verge of office in 1964, he appeared to more than one observer as a latter-day Lloyd George, a radical tribune sprung from provincial nonconformity to drive the nation before him with wit and moral exhortation. After leaving office for the last time, he was more widely compared to Stanley Baldwin, a national conciliator and broker of ...”

“... the subject is generally a grey one some of the characters – Brown, Castle, Wilson, Woodcock, Jones – had colour and some of the events contained high drama. The book does not quite do justice to the sense of desperate exasperation which overcame everyone I know – including Sir Denis – who was obliged during those years to grapple with the ‘union ...”

“... houses.In the face of this insanity, a test case was brought by the ‘Stonehenge Two’, Margaret Jones and Richard Lloyd, who had been charged with ‘trespassory assembly’. It reached the House of Lords in 1999, where it was decided in their favour on the basis that the right to use the public highway for any reasonable ...”

“... the problem is Morgan himself. He has written a long list of books about Wales, the Labour Party, Lloyd George, Wales, Jim Callaghan, Wales, the Labour Party, and just occasionally, to spice things up, about the Labour Party and Wales. He is not just fascinated by this little world but sentimental about it. Take Michael Foot’s marriage to Jill ...”

“... chancellors, who were purged by Johnson. No supposedly dictatorial previous prime minister, not Lloyd George, not Churchill, certainly not Thatcher, came anywhere close to this Stalinist ruthlessness.As we are now seeing, any centralisation of power tends also to centralise corruption. The lobbyists gather like flies or vultures round Number Ten, because no ...”

“... One can see why the theme keeps popping up in Hollywood, notably in Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, where the Indian actor Amrish Puri plays Mola Ram, the high priest of Thuggee, ranting in Hindi as he tears a victim’s heart out with his bare hands. The book from which The Deceivers was derived was, Merchant noted, ‘loosely ...”

“... I imagine he is.  Then to a jam-packed meeting of the parliamentary party. The chairman, Tony Lloyd, opened with a little pep talk, remarking that there was ‘a duty on us collectively not to give into despair’. (Yes, that’s how bad it is.) Then Gordon, eyes half-closed with fatigue, spoke. This was Gordon like I’ve never seen him before. He spoke ...”

“... and the First World War’), F.H. Hinsley (... and the Use of Special Intelligence), R.V. Jones, the happy beam-hunter of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and Zionism) and Roy Jenkins (the Government of 1951-55) are predictably good. The uneven John Keegan (... ’s Strategy), though seemingly disqualified by ...”

“... his experience of the demi-monde and the down-and-out in pre and postwar France so that, as Colin Jones (another former student) put it, ‘the poor, the destitute, the marginal, the outsider, the delinquent, the criminal, the unmarried mother, the prostitute’ became enfranchised in his narratives. Cobb, it was said, put the pimp into the Scarlet ...”

“... of trade-union determination, and he moved to the Admiralty. We may think of both Churchill and Lloyd George as turning away from social reformism to jingoism out of disappointment with labour’s lack of gratitude for small concessions and big speeches. But no adequate political maturing accompanied the trade-union struggles, or was brought about by the ...”