“... of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy Fuller. ‘Infantile simplicity is all,’ wrote Julian Symons.What no one in the symposium quite manages to say, yet almost everyone darkly hints at, is that in 1972 the ‘Poundian revolution’ still looked as if it was carrying the world before ...”

“... likely to be happy. Your desire for a robust and rising standard of living, political freedom, strong bonds with your extended family, a marriage that survives, even a decent climate – all these wishes are most likely to be granted in the Irish Republic. At least this was the case in 2005, when Ireland came top – the UK was 29th – in an Economist ...”

“... early on there were warnings about this insidious process, which was destroying our industry. Sir Roy Harrod, to his great honour, was writing about it already in the Fifties; Lord Kaldor took up the theme in the Sixties; and the Cambridge Economic Policy Group has followed on, with increasing desperation, throughout the Seventies. For growth to be ...”

“... to his concept of French Socialism: but he refused to identify this dictatorship, which he saw as strong and working-class, with the militaristic tyranny of a few men in the Central Committee. Read in our own time of nomenklatura and Soviet despotism, Blum’s speeches of the 1920s have not aged. On his return from Tours, we find him at the Gare ...”

“... with Russia. With a single night’s co-ordinated attacks, IS – a cultish militia perhaps 35,000 strong, ruling a self-declared ‘caliphate’ that no one recognises as a state – achieved something France denied the Algerian FLN until 1999, nearly four decades after independence: acknowledgment that it had been fighting a war, rather than a campaign ...”

“... disclosing an observation made at an Alliance strategy meeting in 1985 – was well expressed by Roy Jenkins, who said that with the British electoral system a hung Parliament might be a statistical outcome, but that it could not be a political objective. The second was that the strategy immediately invited the question: ‘With whom would the Alliance ...”

“... An obvious title would have been Blood and Fire, but that was bagged a couple of years ago by Roy Hattersley for his massive biography of William and Catherine Booth, the Army’s founders. William, the ‘Fool of God’ who made such diverse sinners as Cecil Rhodes and Margot Asquith kneel and pray with him in railway carriages, remains something of a ...”

“... Burke seriously attempted to ascertain what was going on beneath the surface. In Montaillou Le Roy Ladurie utilised one lucky cache of evidence. Professor Ginzburg has found another. Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, lived from 1532 to 1599 or 1600. He was a miller, who spent nearly all his life in Montereale, a small hill town in the Friuli, part of ...”

“... is a phrase coined by Hollywood to describe films whose central premise or selling-point is so strong and simple that it can be summed up in a few words: Ivan Reitman’s Twins (‘Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as twin brothers’) is the classic example. Such films are revered in the movie business because they are thought to be childishly easy ...”

“... the fact that, in the Thirties, certain Augustan habits had attracted not only Edgell Rickword but Roy Campbell. It is significant, however, that the first poems in this Collected show Davie as under the spell, not of Pope or of any of the other primarily satirical authors of the century, but of William Cowper. A pasticheur of late-Augustan styles, I too have ...”

“... We could see the commercial sense in the Newspaper Publishing bid; we told ourselves that a strong left-liberal ‘merged’ paper would offer some opposition to the Sunday Times, rather as a Lib-Lab pact might to the Tories; we knew that the Observer’s title would be kept, and were assured that thirty or forty of its journalists would be ...”

“... of greatness because he is so self-obsessed he can’t understand that the game was up long ago. Roy Hattersley has rightly drawn praise for this portrait: he is better able than most to understand how powerful a parliamentary presence someone of Lloyd George’s rhetorical gifts could be while also doing justice to his dazzling unscrupulousness. There is no ...”

“... Director of Covent Garden and so on; ‘a fine exemplar of the civilisation he portrays’, as Roy Jenkins wrote in a review of author and book together. What made Our Age so arresting was its combination of self-promotion and self-flagellation, and Annan’s wistful reflections on the failures, as well as the successes, of his own generation. Put ...”

“... Communists or Communist sympathisers as Brian Walden, David Owen, Robert Mellish, John Stonehouse, Roy Hattersley and Reg Prentice; and even a bogus pamphlet on ‘revolutionary strategy’ for the installation of socialism in Britain was contrived for off-the-record briefing of American journalists, the joint ‘authors’ being Tony Benn, Stan Orme and Denis ...”

“... wrote next, Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967). His publisher, Secker, was troubled by the ‘strong pornographic and sadistic elements’ in the manuscript, and eventually rejected it (Cape stepped in). Purdy’s mother and father had never been readers of his books, but it is plausible (as Snyder suggests) that he was disinhibited by their deaths ...”