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“... sources are rifled. The extracts from letters that appear in Motion are in Shead; the Angus Morrison unpublished chapter made available to Shead and the Anthony Powell memoir which prefaced Shead’s book are re-quarried. And Motion never cites references – a major irritation of this biography without bibliography. Constant’s life-story is told with ...”

“... humanist Roger Ascham could feel pleasingly fashionable when he claimed that his friends at St John’s College, Cambridge, had worked out that all poetry could be divided into the four very large categories of comedy, tragedy, epic and ‘melic’. Lyric became, in effect, the ‘everything else’ of poetic theory, stuff that was metrical and possibly ...”

“... drinks these days, and where? These scenarios seem unlikely. But perhaps they keep a file on Toni Morrison, who – as a photo that recently went viral made clear – hung out with Angela Davis in the early 1970s, and surely Don DeLillo’s speculations on Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra merited attention. There is at least one known case. In 2013 William Vollmann ...”

“... in vain against the leadership, first of MacDonald, Snowden and Jimmy Thomas, then of Attlee, Morrison, Bevin and the upstart Gaitskell, antagonising the union bosses and the PLP equally, the darling only of the constituencies. He was expelled from the party in 1939 and very nearly again in 1955, and by the time Attlee finally resigned in December 1955 ...”

“... the massive resistance of capital, labour, finance and public opinion. Unlike the Webbs, Mosley or John Strachey (in the authoritarian phase of his Coming Struggle for Power), PEP’s most outspoken planners still held to a belief in planning within an open democratic society. Yet they achieved this worthy position by evading the question of power. Power was ...”

“... overridden. They either had their own power bases in the party, like Arthur Henderson or Herbert Morrison, or in the unions, like Ernest Bevin, or had a political standing, like Aneurin Bevan or James Callaghan, that made them to some extent proof against their leader’s displeasure. With the exception of Gordon Brown, and possibly ...”

“... their families to the coast. The inspiration behind the scheme was George Lansbury, the subject of John Shepherd’s biography, a book as meticulous as it is generous. It is nonetheless timely: just as the prison service has brown-filled this pleasant site, so, too, New Labour has trampled on the radical socialism of which Lansbury was one of the finest ...”

“... wisdom to laymen. From about the middle of the 17th century to the end of the 19th, as Sir John Habakkuk, who thinks more kindly of the legal profession than Hogg and Godwin, shows in his massive and compelling account of English land-ownership over three hundred years, the most common of the ‘entails created’ by the lawyers was the strict ...”

“... a head early in 1982 when both the Deputy Editor, Charles Douglas-Home, and the Managing Editor, John Grant, tendered their resignations. The Chairman refused to accept them, and instead asked Evans for his resignation and appointed Douglas-Home to succeed him. After a few days of disorder on the editorial floor, when Evans declared that he was not resigning ...”

“... private property or surplus, without stress, in balance with nature. In a long conversation with John Carvel, far the most astonishing and winning part of this book, he lays out his own Livingstonian anthropology. These wandering bands did not know war, as the inhabitants of the nuclear-free zone of Lewisham shall not know war. They were ‘a very ...”

“... notably energy, communications, transport, and iron and steel. And it is astonishing to recall, as John Redwood does in Public Enterprise in Crisis, the bright hopes that attended their births. They were to advance social and economic equity, enhance efficiency and actually prevent waste, guard against the abuse of monopoly power, eliminate ...”

“... to the Muse of Death, like the George MacBeth who saw England as The Cleaver Garden or the Blake Morrison who heard The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper. Yet what sets Reading apart is that he has constantly signalled that he is fascinated as much by cut-ups of the text as by cut-ups of the body, as much by style-victimisation as by atrocity. It is this ...”

“... more than seventy years in this hard world, comes before it as an optimist? The handsome head of John Redcliffe-Maud, alias Sir John Maud, GCB, CBE and what else, alias Baron of the City and County of Bristol, looks from the dust-cover with a questioning half-smile. In his Bath robes? Not a bath-robe, anyway, though it ...”

“... got their first chance in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson; but even they arrived by what might be called the bohemian route. There are of course other ways in; anybody can see how much space the dons occupy in the respectable papers and magazines. Many moved in by routes that did ...”

“... toxic mix of power, ambition and exhaustion is a recipe for rivalries: Churchill and Chamberlain, Morrison and Bevan, Heath and Thatcher. It is astonishing that the convention of collective responsibility – of ‘we hang together or we hang apart’ – just about prevents cabinet government from morphing into one-man rule. Politics is not a profession that ...”