“... but the virtual disappearance of senior figures in local government has passed unremarked. In the Wilson and Callaghan Cabinets there were only two or three ministers who had served as local councillors and none who had led a Borough or County Council. Local government leaders received their knighthoods and occasionally went to the House of Lords. Secondary ...”

“... circle of parasites.’ His regard for the play was shared by Chesterton’s new acquaintance G. Wilson Knight, a schoolmaster and fellow ex-serviceman who sent him essays and accompanied him to plays, after which they would repair to the ‘Dirty Duck’ (the pub was really called the Black Swan). Half a century later Knight recalled these jaunts as ...”

“... Dáil Éireann was proscribed in September 1919. In the subsequent guerrilla warfare of 1919-21 Michael Collins, the Minister for Finance and Director of Intelligence of the Volunteers or Irish Republican Army, rose to prominence. In 1920 Britain established Home Rule states – one substantive, comprising the six Unionist-majority north-eastern ...”

“... Testament prophet from whom the more ambitious and modern-minded of his former supporters, like Wilson and Cross-man, were now anxious to distance themselves. It is a matter for argument whether by 1959 he was mellowing into a position of authority in the party: it took his death the following year to transform him into the maligned hero and inspiration of ...”

“... Whitehall, starting with their first member the Earl of Cavan – described by the waspish Henry Wilson as ‘ignorant, pompous, vain and narrow, but a nice man and a fine fighting soldier’. But Cavan’s colleagues were the formidable Beatty for the Navy and the even more formidable Trenchard for the RAF, and the conflict between these two mastodons ...”

“... group. Everyone laughs at naive Janice, who says in her hokey country accent: ‘I love me some Michael Jackson.’ Even lower down the social scale is Daphne, the poor child of a cleaning woman. She hardly ever speaks, but once wrote a prize-winning poem containing the lines: ‘You are my father, the veteran/When you cry in the dark/It rains and rains and ...”

“... moves’, a problem for shortlisted novelists leading sedentary lives, but not for the impressive Michael Collins – author of The Keepers of Truth and a keen runner. As well as completing his novel, Collins has managed to finish a marathon. A jog through the streets of London dressed up in rhino costume wasn’t quite challenging enough for him, however: he ...”

“... by that rickety wood. I’d seen it before, in that frame, and I knew who it was: my grandfather Michael. I knew that’s who it was though I’d never met him. The grandfather was covered in dust and damp patches dried in. But that was him: he had the darkest eyes I’d ever seen. His hair was slick, combed up to a glistening ridge; the lips were thin, the ...”

“... of grandeur about our post-imperial role in Asia and Africa’ which he discerned in Wilson. As Healey writes of the withdrawal from Aden: ‘All alternatives would have been worse.’ Over the British nuclear deterrent, Healey’s approach can be termed either brutally pragmatic or woefully disingenuous: either way, it did him no good in the ...”

“... the miners’ strike. In the February election the voters returned an uncertain decision: Harold Wilson’s Labour Party took 301 seats on 11.7 million votes, Heath’s Tories got 297 seats on 11.9 million votes, and the Liberals led by Jeremy Thorpe found that their six million votes translated into 14 seats. The Liberals’ mini-revival suggested a ...”

“... calculating machines’. Attlee regarded theory as stuff and nonsense and Harold Wilson doused his food with HP Sauce to project a plain-man image. It was the people’s dominatrix who caused a turnaround. Pragmatic to the core, she took up philosophers she agreed with and allowed her instincts to be dignified as an ideology. Since ...”

“... inside a Department – as in the case of what came to me from Clive Ponting. A careful look at Michael Heseltine’s lengthy broadcast evidence shows what exactly was taking place in the Whitehall stratosphere during the month in which Hilda Murrell was murdered. On 6 March Denzil Davies wrote to the Prime Minister, about discrepancies in Mrs Thatcher’s ...”

“... has another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about it’ was ‘regarded as extremely bad form’. But that was not so, certainly at the start, and in ...”

“... the States) dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Arguing against Edmund Wilson and his psychobiographer followers, Wills denies that Lincoln entertained a parricidal wish for political immortality. He was driven by no desire to slay and surpass the Revolutionary fathers, to create an imperial Presidency presiding over a mystic ...”

“... transport frontbenchers in the Commons, up-and-coming young hopefuls called Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine, welcomed the transfer, and specifically stated that this would enable the Council, if it felt like it, to hold transport fares down with a subsidy from the rates. Labour won back the GLC in 1973, but lost it to the Tories in 1977, when the new ...”