“... 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 ...”

“... of new schools of literature has become a given, a plot point in a narrative as familiar as a John Grisham thriller or a Danielle Steel romance: somewhere, ‘out there’, a few writers are preparing the ‘next big thing’, and these writers will ‘unexpectedly emerge’, usually at a time when critics are bemoaning the lack of fresh talent on the ...”

“... the success of Northern Irish poetry during the last twenty-five or thirty years. Ever since Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion gave the primacy of this work semi-official status in The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary British Poetry, the question has been what gives Northern Irish poets their edge. Many reasons have been advanced for the ...”

“... piece of information, and, except in occasional flashes of personal animosity (as against Herbert Morrison or Denis Healey), without much passion or enthusiasm. There is only one good joke, and it was made at Wilson’s expense by Aneurin Bevan. When Wilson announced with customary Yorkshire pomposity that he was ‘forged’ in that county, Bevan ...”

“... moment of his election to Parliament to the eventual achievement of his goal. One wonders whether John Major ever heard a similar message click-clacking from railway carriage wheels in the course of his extraordinary non-stop journey up the same greasy pole. There was scarcely time for him to form expectations during the interval that ran from his original ...”

“... the impression McEwen made in his life. He was born into a Scottish gentry family, the son of Sir John McEwen, Conservative under-secretary of state for Scotland, and his wife, Brigid Lindley. Rory and his five brothers and one sister grew up in Berwickshire in the family’s Palladian mansion, Marchmont. Commenting later on his interest in Redouté, he wrote ...”

“... them out into the corridor and took on an independent, if less coherent, life there. ‘Jim Morrison was a tripper,’ he said warmly. ‘But no one knows what happened to him.’ They walked past the small quad, where NCC cadets marched to ‘daine baye daine baye’ on Fridays. On the wall at that end, which separated the school from the Gyan Sadhana ...”

“... another party if it is to be more than assent. It happens within the heart (according to King John) but becomes consent only when it is declared. The word could mean, as now, agreement to a proposal, but Shakespeare’s plays reflect social conditions in which consent between lovers depends on the consent given by friends and family. As Petruchio tells ...”

“... Jack Kerouac is alive. Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and worldwide backing of one ...”

“... literary history (even though the story wends its way from Thomas Wolfe through Nabokov and John Barth, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, all the way to Raymond Carver), nor those of traditional aesthetics and literary criticism, which raise issues of value and try to define true art as this rather than that. The dialectical problems come in the ...”

“... mischievous matchmakers, innocent fun, uileann pipes, sea-wind in the hair. Even if you swap John Ford’s Ireland for something more urban and contemporary, say that of Roddy Doyle, in which a good night out is more likely to involve soul music and a ‘ride’, it is still possible to find yourself idealising: Ford and Doyle (pre-Paddy Clarke and ...”

“... goes more smoothly. We are given the necessary information about the likes of Hockney, Ted Hughes, John Berger, Germaine Greer and Noam Chomsky. Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (‘a logical enough outcome’) are briskly explained, Barthes, Lacan and Derrida rush by, Foucault and Althüsser get a rather breathless mention as part of the ‘post-modern ...”

“... that the owners of the Times could have done more to restrain Dawson from his excesses; as it was, John Walter IV, co-proprietor with Lord Astor, complained when ‘our leader-writer’ proposed dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. His qualms were ‘airily’ brushed aside by Dawson. Half a century on, what of Rupert Murdoch? ‘Arguably,’ says Heren, ‘he ...”

“... defeat or resign himself. At the crucial moment, Attlee, the conciliator, was in hospital; Morrison in the Prime Minister’s chair. Gaitskell prevailed, and ten days after the decision to introduce the necessary Health Service charges legislation was announced, Bevan resigned. Could it, even at a late stage, have been avoided? Possibly, not ...”

“... really work: readers are not going to do the necessary regression analysis to make sense of it. John Curtice and Michael Steed also produce an immensely careful and laborious analysis of constituency results, their main conclusion being to confirm that the economy was not the master issue which moved the electorate. The Norris and Gavin volume contains a ...”