“... framed the Budget as a test of ministerial loyalty to the American alliance. Be that as it may, Morgan is right to conclude that Gaitskell’s Budget ‘may fairly be considered a political and economic disaster’. Labour’s first two Chancellors, Dalton and Cripps, rate more favourably. Hugh Dalton, with his ...”

“... son. He was happiest in the army, and perhaps the Communist Party. A structured male environment may have been his deepest need. The left-wing connection is a further facet of Hammett’s hold on our minds. Recently-opened FBI files are said to confirm that he was a CP member – although the laughable ineptitude of FBI agents and informers revealed by Ms ...”

“... solidarity was frustrated. Azbel and his companions were not to be deterred, however. In May 1977 they managed to get a number of foreign scientists to Moscow for a special jubilee meeting of the seminar. Fifty or sixty people crowded into his apartment, to celebrate the fifth anniversary of this unique scientific institution, and to emphasise the ...”

“... boroughs are likely to be under different political control from the ILEA, and since the GLC may be, it would be unreasonable to give any of them the power of refusal. Given the way the constitution is set up, there is little alternative to this system, but it is not difficult to understand the anxiety and friction to which it has given rise. But ...”

“... Madox Ford’ and William Carlos Williams’s ‘To Ford Madox Ford in Heaven’. And you may say that his luck holds: for Robert Green is also an admirer, but his book is thoroughly sensible, unbedazzled and discriminating, the book of someone who has heard of other writers and is in no kind of ‘Special relationship’ to Ford. What he has set out ...”

“... States; even in Latin America and Japan his reputation later ‘crested’, and any tears he may have shed over the criticism of Trevor-Roper and Pieter Geyl must have been quickly dried. The completion of his Study of History and his retirement from Chatham House made no difference to his literary activity, and until his death in 1975 books and articles ...”

“... than the widespread apprehension of Bewick as an untutored rustic would lead us to believe. Bewick may have been bluff and candid but he was never artless. His Memoir, written when he heard that ‘more than one literary character’ was planning his biography, is a remarkably skilful and disingenuous apologia, intended to establish his stature both as an ...”

“... Girl, and Mrs Aitken Kidd’s plaudits could be seen merely as examples of filial piety. But they may illustrate – as may the accounts of John Osborne’s little domestic difficulties – the triumph of charm over bad ...”

“... book seems to have been hopelessly unfinished at the time of his death. In Capote’s case, we may be forgiven for asking if the fame didn’t far outstrip the promise, and if his was rather less a major talent dissipated than a minor gift cleverly marketed. Taking the generous view of Capote’s talent and importance after the publication of his first ...”

“... thing was twenty-five years old, just like him. And so it was: the date on the cover said April/May 1962. Small wonder that when it came to my turn to address the conference I was in richly elegiac mood. By that stage, I was doing my own casting: that is to say, I had actually turned into what they’d hired me as: a relic. I announced as my subject: Why ...”

“... that the Henry Moore Foundation might help a publisher, so a number of old conversations may yet see print. I was an inquisitive, I hope scholarly ghost. The project was to write a history of the sculpture department at St Martin’s School of Art. Anthony Caro invited me to do it, and the idea was that the book would be a tribute to Frank ...”

“... about whom rather less is known. In general, though, Sontag does her homework thoroughly: and this may well point to one very basic reason why she has selected the apparently bizarre literary form of a historical novel. As Balzac put it, characters in ordinary novels have to be roused to life by their inventors. But historical characters have already ...”

“... man, the joyful reaction of the crowd, and the adherence to a form of ritual (however corrupt it may have been) – all these set the execution of Alain de Monéys apart from ordinary murder. The vast majority of the mob, having come to the fairground from beyond the immediate village, did not know then victim. Familiarity ...”

“... most stimulating paper is one by Bernhard Decker which speculates on how anxiety about idolatry may have determined changes in form and style in the German altarpiece before it led to iconoclasm. He points out that reliquary sculpture – originally gold-plated wooden figures or busts containing relics – were less likely to ‘prompt acts of physical ...”

“... mysticism that took hold all over Europe at the time, and Ireland was not immune. Hindsight may regard it as unhealthy, largely because of the fate of that generation, but also because it had links, now visible, with post-war Fascism. In his last years Yeats felt a tug in that direction, though for all his wild-old-man sword-waving he seems very ...”