“... a heckler shouted ‘nigger lover’ at him, he retorted angrily that he was no such thing. Harold Wilson, the new Labour Prime Minister, denounced the young MP from Smethwick as a ‘Parliamentary leper’, and before long Griffiths was drowned in the full Labour tide of 1966. But even before the 1966 election, the Labour Party had turned the retreat at ...”

“... On 28 November 1988, Paul Ingram, a police officer, was arrested by colleagues in his office in Olympia, Washington State. His daughters, Ericka and Julie, had accused him of sexual molestation. Ingram made no attempt to deny the charges. He couldn’t remember doing anything, but he said: ‘My girls know me. They wouldn’t lie about something like this ...”

“... house for the weekend, simply in order to tease them? But this is what Waugh heroically did to Mr Paul Moor. After Moor had been ushered over the threshold by Waugh’s butler (the date is 1949, when outside the pages of P.G. Wodehouse butlers were a virtually extinct species) he encountered the man he described as his ‘idol’. ‘After an elaborate ...”

“... Paul Fussell’s 34 essays were written in different moods and time-zones for different British and American journals, between 1967 and 1982. Some are boyishly truculent, politically partisan, denouncing wrong-headed fellow Americans (so that the British reviewer whistles between his teeth, thinking: ‘They can’t be as bad as all that ...”

“... at all of what had gone wrong with their little project. Was there a single member of the Wilson Front Bench who could stand up for a second to the icy brilliance of James, a black product of British colonialism who had come back to slay every kind of illusion, including the illusions of black nationalism and Soviet fraternal aid? At the back of the ...”

“... room in Whalley Range’, about iron bridges and ‘a river the colour of lead’. In May 1983, Paul Slattery – who had photographed Joy Division in 1979, too, beside an industrial estate in Stockport – took some shots for Sounds of The Smiths standing in the ruins of Central Station, once the pride of the Midland Railway Company but by then a rackety ...”

“... It may be that a partnership between art and sickness is a trademark of High Modernism, as Edmund Wilson argued in The Wound and the Bow. But if so, Lawrence wanted to be in a different business. Modernist sickness is more likely to be neurasthenia or hypochondria than the real thing, and to Lawrence, such sickness represents the fatal flaw of the modern ...”

“... only walk-on roles in the Cabinet, while younger recruits to Benn’s Campaign Group, such as Paul Boateng and Dawn Primarolo, have not been allowed to speak in their own voices by Gordon Brown. No one has been more aware of the collapse of the Bennite agenda than Benn himself. His volume of diaries from the 1980s – The End of an Era ...”

“... understand how one can be enslaved by it without hating it bitterly’). It is typical of A.N. Wilson’s insouciance that the death scene in his Love Unknown is the breeziest possible – the abrupt demise of a character merely inserted so that she can be killed off (though not before she can be mocked). These two novels are more conventionally devised ...”

“... him. None of her letters from the period before 1944 survives. In her new biography, Frances Wilson speculates that Spark briefly worked as a spy in South Africa, though the evidence for this is slim. She and Sydney had a son, Robin, whom Spark decided to leave behind (he was safe from his father in a convent school) while she risked escaping from her ...”

“... the greatest English novelist of his generation. Certainly Graham Greene, Henry Green and Angus Wilson thought so, although they and not he won the worldly honours Waugh would dearly have loved. On the other hand, that redoubtable holder of the Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he have nominated? Orwell, Elizabeth ...”

“... state for Northern Ireland, Willie Whitelaw, in the grand Cheyne Walk home of his junior minister, Paul Channon. Unsurprisingly, it did not go well, and not just because of ideological differences, or the class gulf between toffs and scruffs. For a start, the hardline Mac Stiofáin had excluded from his team the flexible and imaginative Ó Brádaigh, the ...”

“... realist blockbusters, and if you’ve been to Barcelona for a brief holiday recently, Barbara Wilson’s Gaudi Afternoon is just the novel for you. It has a great new heroine, Cassandra Reilly, an Irish-American dyke of fortysomething, who seems to spend her life sorting out people’s problems here and there, translating the odd thing from the Spanish ...”

“... from Vienna’. It is known that she was forced into a sexual relationship with the SS officer Paul Groth, a man notorious for the punishments he inflicted – ritual humiliations, random shootings, urinating into inmates’ mouths. However, according to fellow prisoners, as he fell in love with Ruth his behaviour softened somewhat, and he stopped beating ...”

“... his safety pin tried various tricks, sometimes cruel, to produce a reaction. In The Conspirators, Paul Henreid managed to get her to look flustered by telling her ‘that with the lights behind her I could see right through her negligée’. The director of The Strange Woman rapped her on the ankles and the knuckles with a baton. Barton suggests that her ...”